THE MASTER OF NOTHING
Heads-up: I liked this film, one that seems to be pretty divisive among critics and audiences, as far as the naval-gazing of ‘serious’ scant-seen cinema can ever be considered divisive. Here P.T. Anderson (BOOGIE NIGHTS, MAGNOLIA, PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, THERE WILL BE BLOOD) adds an odd, lumbering “thinker” to his award-studded oeuvre. And it’s amazingly boring.
Indeed, Ye Who Tread Here Beware: There Will Be Boredom. There Will Be Overlong Sequences and Empty Conversations. There Will Be Trivial Dialogue that Leads No Where. There Will be Dropped Plotlines. There Will Be Little Evocative Sex. There Will Be Essentially No Blood.
If you come to the movie to be entertained—which is probably a perfectly sane reason to spend $12 bucks to sit in a dark room for two hours—THE MASTER is probably not the film for you. If being entertained is not a necessity for you when you commit to watching a film, there’s a shot you’ll mine something worthwhile here, which is where I finally landed. But this one should be firmly and without judgment stamped: NOT FOR EVERYONE.
Why’s it so difficult? THE MASTER works very hard to go no where. It is a work of studious and meticulous anti-entertainment, which has more in common with a film like INLAND EMPIRE than THERE WILL BE BLOOD. It’s almost three hours, and yet barely anything happens that is recognizable as plot. I mean characters meet and fight and reconcile and fight again and are arrested and are freed and eat dinner and then breakfast and then dinner again – but as far as the Aristotelian hallmarks of “drama”: no where, no how. Conversations are repetitive and fatuous. A lot of bombast is drummed up around ideas, but at a certain point you stop and think—what does any of this MEAN? Isn’t this all a load of bullshit? And the answer is Yes.
Anderson has pulled off a trick here, whether you (or, I think some may argue, he) knows it or not. For THE MASTER is a movie that parallels the rise of Scientology as envisioned by one cryptic yet gregarious charlatan. THE MASTER’s own filmic rhetoric matches that of the discourse it thematically apes: a whole lot of nothing, artfully sold. Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the E.L Hubbard substitute provides everything you need for a “Religion” except that pesky detail of content: big promises, vague concepts, dynamic personae, and—as it is slowly and ‘masterfully’ revealed—rooted instability. Who is the more dangerous man? Joaquin Phoenix’s drifter, prone to drunken paroxysms of violence and anger? Or PSH’s learned guru, so "sure" of his beliefs that he cannot even engage with dissenters? I’d argue the latter.
The seminal image of the film comes in something of a montage, as Phoenix’s character Freddie Quell is instructed by Hoffman to undergo a series of exercises designed to achieve…something. Like everything else in this film you are never sure what these are supposed to lead to, when any sort of psychological revelation is expected, and—most importantly—what that revelation will even look like when it arrives. One of the exercises is for Freddie to walk back and forth between a window and a wall, putting his hand on each surface when he arrives. He is to describe the feel of each surface—the warm, glossy window; the cold hard wood—and then walk back to the other side of the room and do it again. Freddie is frustrated when he just feels a wall—“it’s just a fucking wall!”—time and time again. It’s a version of the “Wax on-Wax off” Karate Kid trope: a repetitive tasks that will giveway to insight. It’s coming right? Yet, in THE MASTER our Danny-san never learns the fabled Crane Kick: insight is not coming because the philosophy behind it is so thoroughly specious.
And so that is the experience of watching THE MASTER in sum and substance: walking between a plate glass window and a hardwood wall and waiting for some sort of revelation that will not come. You may not need to sit through all three hours of this film to realize that. But P.T. Anderson hasn’t failed in this film to give us something. It may not be the grandiose set-pieces of THERE WILL BE BLOOD’s oil rigs or the hipster realism of PUNCH DRUNK LOVE's earnest-Sandler. It doesn’t have the cacophonous poetics of MAGNOLIA, nor the giant Wahlbergian schlong of BOOGIE NIGHTS. With THE MASTER, P.T. Anderson has given us something bigger than any of them: nothing at all.
