Sunday, May 12, 2013
BIGGER THAN LIFE
Today's film, a NYTimes Critics' Pick was Paul Thomas Anderson's
This film is one of a series by Anderson that goes beyond "real life". He is good at taking an event or personna of the times and working around it.
Boogie Nights, There Will be Blood were about a time and place and the people trying to work around and through it.
This film is the same.
Ostensibly it is about The Master played by Philip Seymour Hoffman but then is taken over by a half crazy acolyte, alcoholic Joaquin Phoenix. Then their relationship, rich and scary. And then the times. The Fifties. Filled with postwar craziness, crazies and crazed adherent to "new ideas".
The Master is based to a loose extent on L. Ron Hubbard. Even though they have denied this, I read the book.
The cult is in the background. What is foremost is the obsessive relationship between the guru and this apostate who will not be managed, or cannot.
The performances of these two men as the ego and id are matched by the power and strength of the woman behind the throne, Amy Adams. A tough manipulator of her man and powerful controller of the threat to him by this crazy alcoholic. Supeprego.
I love it when a writer director goes back so obviously to the "discredited" Freud and reinvents the themes that persist in our times. Freud always wins.
The story is not in the story but in the invisible lines between the three.
There are true believers, Laura Dern and real apostates, the Master's son who sees it all as a parade of whatever comes into his Dad's mind at the time.
There are moments in this film that are so cringeworthy that I had to look away. There are other times when the beauty of natural settings overwhelm the picayune behaviors of the master, his rebellious slave and his ever watchful wife and family.
Shot in 70mm they say. It is apparent in the ocean, the city, the desert and even in the view of a house they stay in for awhile. A suburban mansion beauty.
So, it is not about Scientology any more than it is a about the end of WWII. Or the Master or about rebellion. Or, for that matter alcoholism.
Throb and pulse. Change is in the wind and we know from our own lives how it all turned out.
Phoenix is a very strange cat. He holds himself in a strange way, he maneuvers his face into grotesque and crazy positions. He is untamed. Furious. A danger to himself, perhaps others.
I am not sure that I have seen him before. He is a perfect match for Seymour Hoffman. And the reverse. Amy Adams. Another new presence. I have seen her before but here, she commands.
The film itself is an event. The story. A part of the life's work of a great director. Confounding at times, I think that it will stick in my brain for awhile.
After all, I used to be in the "master" business myself. True.
It is a definite 5 out of Netflix5.
Labels: films
