Paul Thomas Anderson (USA, born 1970)
The Master (2012)
(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)
Freddie Quell is a strange guy. He’s obsessed with sex, and in our opening montage we see him masturbating, in broad daylight, on a beach. In other moments, he lies inert and clinging to the figure of a nude woman fashioned from sand.
He’s not relatable or sympathetic. Neither is Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, or the vast majority of the characters in Boogie Nights, so this seems to be a trait with Paul Thomas Anderson films.
Still, there’s something different about Freddie. Daniel Plainview could act like a regular person when he wanted to, and so could the Boogie Nights cast, but it doesn’t look like Freddie can. For one thing, he doesn’t seem to feel embarrassment, or shame, or self-consciousness. He appears to go around doing whatever he wants, the very embodiment of impulsivity, or the id.
There are traces of Joaquin Phoenix’s later performance in Joker here, but in that film there was a sweetness to Arthur Fleck, a desire to befriend and to be liked that, amongst other things, attracts bullies and isn’t really present in the more macho, less sensitive Freddie Quell, outsider though he is. In any case, Freddie meets Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, who runs a cult, and the two of them form a close bond. We don’t know why. Dodd is everything that Quell isn’t: he’s temperate, he’s sociable, he’s academic. He’s well-fed. He’s ambitious. He has a decent, respectable home life and he dresses smartly.
Their relationship seems heavily co-dependant. That can happen sometimes, even with two people who apparently have very little in common. But there is an aberration in Dodd’s personality that could go some way to explain why this connection has come about. Quell is aberrant, Dodd is aberrant too; maybe somehow, some way, they can be aberrant together, and negotiate around the fact that Dodd still has to answer to his wife. Hoffman applies a level of sleaze to his portrayal that is never acknowledged by anyone, not even by Anderson’s camera in private. Moreover, he is a man who is aware of how charm works, and, through obvious practice, is very, very good at imitating it, but doesn’t actually have any genuine natural charm himself. Neither is he comfortable or relaxed when he is addressing crowds, though again, he can do a thumpingly convincing impression of someone who is.
When films are essentially a two-hander, one runs the risk of employing supporting actors that, when looked at from a mercenary angle, don’t really need to be there. I feel that that is the case in this picture. Amy Adams gets a decent-sized role, but Laura Dern, Rami Malek, Jesse Plemons and Kevin J. O’Connor are little more than stage dressing.
For the most part, this is a character-driven drama with the occasional idiosyncratic flourish. Then, intermittently, Anderson will throw a scene at us that is thoroughly bizarre. One is the two men grabbing each other in a show of affection and proceeding to actually get on the floor and roll around on the lawn in front of everyone. Another is a song-and-dance routine that Hoffman performs while flanked by an assortment of naked women that were, just a moment ago, clothed. Like Under the Skin, we are ostensibly seeing things that didn’t actually occur and the camera itself is an unreliable narrator; unlike Under the Skin, we don’t get huge chasms of screentime played out at an excruciating pace with barely any dialogue, and subsequently I didn’t find The Master’s digressions as alienating (pardon the pun).
Nevertheless, it was often difficult to know exactly what to make of all of this. I couldn’t really decide if I actually liked the film or not. I admired it- it was brazen, it was uncompromising, and it strikes a note that I don’t think I have ever quite seen in any other film- but I don’t know whether I liked it. It’s instilled with the same subversive spirit that saw There Will Be Blood, after two and a half hours of turgid, challenging drama, end with Daniel Day-Lewis screaming about milkshakes and throwing bowling balls around. The Master similarly ends on its own free-jazz rhythm, with scenes that also echo No Country for Old Men’s non-sequitur denouement. This is the chaos of life, I guess, or perhaps the chaos of the psyche, as we appear to be seeing everything through Freddie Quell’s broken filter. Hoffman’s character, for the second time, breaks into song. Then a sex scene arrives out of nowhere. And the final shot shows Freddie right back where he was at the beginning, on the beach, clutching at a woman made from sand, which seemed to imply that everything in between- the entire film, basically- was a hallucination. This actually makes perverse sense within the film’s internal logic, such as it is. It would explain away conveniences in the plot- the fact that Dodd immediately takes to Freddie, for example, with no warming-up period, or the fact that his status as a cult leader allows him to move a stranger into his family’s house without it seeming all that unusual.
Or of course there may be metaphors there. It’s possible that the camera-eye is not comprehensive- far from it, in fact- and Quell and Dodd have given in to their bizarre chemistry and actually had sex with each other off-screen. It’s even possible that they are the same person, and our ending represents Dodd, at his wife’s behest, reluctantly telling the feral side of his character to leave forever. This interpretation would also mean that the scene where Dodd ‘processes’ Freddie was actually Dodd analysing and/or having an internal dialogue with himself, in a manner which, to varying extents, we all do.
Either way, The Master comes mildly recommended for people who want a piece of odd, against-the-grain cinema with a decent budget and great actors, although I occasionally found Joaquin Phoenix’s mumbling performance a little overcooked. As for Hoffman, I have never had a favourite actor, but if I did, it could well be him, and in The Master he makes another strong posthumous contribution to that possibility. I didn’t like his performance as much as the ones he gave in Almost Famous, 25th Hour, or The Savages, but then I liked those films more, and in them he was playing kind, decent people.
Inherent Vice (2014)
(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)
As I began this movie, as its opening scenes unfolded and I heard the immortal strains of Vitamin C by Can strike up, I thought ‘Yeah. This is groovy, man. It’s in the pocket. I think I’m gonna like Inherent Vice.’
I was right, for a while. Then doubts started to creep in. It’s an exercise in style, and silliness, and stylish silliness, I guess, or just, like, y’know, an exercise in, probably, like, just some weird shit, man, like some heavy shit or something, probably. They get Joanna Newsom in to do a coy, croaky, little-girl voiceover narration. They get the extreme porn actress Belladonna in to perform a small role (she’s not bad, actually). And the self-satisfied bizarro tendencies of the Coen Brothers and Wes Anderson run across the movie like meth coursing through a tweaker’s veins. The random female nudity from The Master has been dropped into it, all present and correct. The pointless supporting performances are back too- in this case, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Reese Witherspoon, Eric Roberts, Owen Wilson and Michael Kenneth Williams are all onboard to make appearances that register as little more than cameos.
This is real acquired-taste stuff, the kind of thing some people might call love-or-hate. It goes one way, then it goes the other, then it flips you upside-down and tries to tickle your belly. I didn’t hate it, but if we’re envisaging a spectrum, my feelings fell firmly on the side of ‘dislike’. It seems that Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who is uncommonly conversant with the rules of filmmaking, all the accepted standards and the touchstones that many of us barely think about, and knows he is, and uses this understanding to methodically and systematically thumb his nose at them, like The Goons, Monty Python and the Firesign Theatre did in a more overtly comedic context back in the 1950s and 60s, producing material that couldn’t have existed if a framework of tradition, recognisable reference points and consumer expectation hadn’t been laid down first.
This is, nonetheless, a remarkably comic film, striking in its willingness to engage in knockabout set-piece. Frustratingly, I felt that there was a movie hidden somewhere inside Inherent Vice that I would have really enjoyed, one which was crackling with invention and in which its particular strain of absurdist deadpan humour was hitting some genuinely very funny notes. If we were to look at There Will Be Blood, The Master and Inherent Vice together, chronologically, then it would seem there is a pattern in which comic elements are steadily increased whilst coherence levels summarily drop off.
As a long-time lover of some deliberately strange and abstract music- My Bloody Valentine, for example, or Boards of Canada, artists who regularly employ distortive elements to re-create a removed reality that exists only with the involvement of memory, medication, insanity or sleep, I have only recently begun to ask myself why I’ve spent decades neglecting to apply these same principles to other artistic mediums (in this instance, Inherent Vice seems to want to simulate the marijuana haze that our principal character perpetually walks around in). I couldn’t have told you exactly why My Bloody Valentine, when performing live, had to spend 20 minutes of their concert- often more- pummelling the audience with an endurance test of horrendous feedback, but I unquestionably accepted their right to do it as part of a creative statement. After all, it was their gig, playing their songs- they could do whatever they wanted within those parameters, I concluded. I didn’t want to sit and listen to the wild squalls of John Coltrane’s outer limits, but I felt like I understood the context in which they were being performed. Yet I found the work of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Piero Manzoni, amongst others, impossible to appreciate on their own terms and nigh-on ridiculous.
I had to address such issues again when I considered scenes in this movie which were the filmic equivalent of a song with its melody, harmony and structure all collapsing in on themselves and featuring lyrics of complete obfuscation. Earlier, I compared Margaret to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and like that film, I feel Inherent Vice might have gone down easier if it had been an album, in this case maybe something by Frank Zappa, who, like Anderson, looked at the fundamentals of his medium and decided to make confetti from them. Zappa, however, hated drugs, so- I don’t know- perhaps a Primus album would be more apt, or Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, A True Star, or Beck’s Odelay, or (gulp) Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, albums which are, undoubtedly, full to the brim with prodigious wit and audacity but, if you’re anything like me, you couldn’t eat a whole one, especially where that latter album’s concerned. As already stated, an LP gives you the luxury of skipping tracks or even whole sections that you find indigestible- when I listen to Tago Mago, for instance, I never play the half-hour segment that comprises ‘Aumgn’ and ‘Peking O’, and honestly don’t really know why anyone would. But it’s fine, because if Can want to release material like that, it’s their prerogative, especially when they immediately follow it with two albums that are as supple and sublime as Ege Bamyasi and Future Days.
Is it Anderson’s prerogative too? Yes, of course it is, but when I watch Josh Brolin kick down a door that he could have very, very easily just knocked on and lift a silver tray full of marijuana to his mouth and chomp and chew on its contents, rolling papers and all, while making hard eye contact with Joaquin Phoenix before leaving without a word, and then very shortly after that I am sitting watching the end credits, feeling like whatever the joke is, it’s pointedly on me, can I really be expected to give the movie some sort of appreciative, enthusiastic review? It’s not even a short film- there’s a full hundred and fifty minutes of this bollocks, an entire hour more than Timbuktu, and 70 minutes more than Ida, The Gleaners & I or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, the latter of which will of course feature in an upcoming review.
Positives? Absolutely- there are bound to be in a film with so much style and talent on the table. Joaquin Phoenix is really good in this, playing a much more likable and much less psychotic guy than The Master’s Freddie Quell, and giving what is probably my personal favourite performance of his career so far. Doc Sportello is a character that, in the wrong hands, could easily have been forgettable and/or irritating, yet Phoenix inhabits him with such lovable, shaggy-dog charm that it feels as if he could play him forever, in swathes of movies that required bumbling stoner characters, whilst always maintaining these high levels of persuasive aplomb. The square-jawed Brolin is good too, a robust comic foil for our down-at-heel hero.
Overall, though? Freaky-deaky, man. Not jivin’.
Bummer.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)
Daniel Plainview is an enigma. The opening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s dust-blown opus shows him digging, alone, in an underground well. There have been no establishing scenes to tell us anything about this character. We don’t know how he has come to be there. We don’t know anything about his past or his motivations, and what little we discover over the course of the picture is largely open to interpretation.
Having seen the film before, I now knew what kind of person Plainview was- or, at least, the person he was going to turn into (spoilers ahead). I found this made the movie much easier to decode. That’s not to say I understood Plainview’s subsequent behaviour- I didn’t- but when he spends the first hour or so of the picture coming across like a taciturn, driven guy whose intentions might be relatively genuine, I knew that this was not the case, and I was not perplexed as he devolved into someone else.
Someone who doesn’t have a scrap of decency in his entire body.
Like American Psycho, or Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, There Will Be Blood presents us with a character who is a candidate for Worst Person Ever. Any human qualities are a conscious imitation of things they’ve seen other people do and say, and exhibited solely as a means to getting what they want in a given situation. I don’t think Anton Chigurh necessarily qualifies for this particular list, because he doesn’t have the same oily nuances in his character; he doesn’t strike me as someone you could readily meet in your day-to-day life- at work, in the pub, at the supermarket, or in positions of local authority- whereas these other three, at least in concept, definitely are. In this case, Plainview reminds me of that terrible teacher or despicable boss who is constantly in a bad mood, irrespective of whether there is any discernible reason to be, visibly bristles at the very hint of being questioned or challenged, erupts at perceived slights and thinks nothing of talking to people like they’re pieces of shit- insists on it, in fact- yet can throw a respectable, firm-but-fair, ostensibly level-headed veneer over their personality when it suits them; for good measure, Plainview throws false humility in there, too.
In this analogy, Paul Dano’s Eli Sunday is that pupil/employee who the teacher/boss inexplicably has it in for. Sure they’re rude to other people too, but there’s that one person for whom there’s clearly something deeper going on and they save a special reserve of bile. The perceived flaws of the bullied victim become exaggerated and take on the form of insurmountable transgressions- in this case, Eli is an irritating upstart who needles Daniel with pestering requests, assumes his devout religious ideology is shared, or at least deeply respected, by everyone around him and has an inflated sense of his own self-worth. Their antagonistic relationship develops to the point where Eli does eventually give Plainview just cause to dislike him, but only after he has been severely provoked himself in the form of a physical assault, and in any case, Plainview’s baseless contempt for the young man is palpable immediately. The movie, on one level, could be characterised as a back-and-forth between these two characters as they each attempt to establish dominance over the other and both enjoy points at which they are ‘winning’.
Earlier in these reviews, I have made reference to my previous distaste for There Will Be Blood, a film that way back in about 2010, I thought lacked purpose, finished through gritted teeth and in echoes of Anderson’s Inherent Vice, ultimately felt was playing some sort of facetious game with me. I am now perfectly happy to admit that I was completely wrong. I did, in fact, enjoy There Will Be Blood considerably. As stated, I feel that much of this was down to my ability to observe Plainview, and his character’s descent into utter detestability, from a more informed vantage point; I also knew how the film was going to end, so wasn’t blindsided or shocked by it. Quite the contrary- I laughed. The sequence was an extremely effective piece of coal-black, teasing, mordant slapstick comedy, very much at odds with its preceding material without, I felt, cheapening it.
Why does Daniel do what he does at the end, though? We can deduce that his extreme wealth has not brought him happiness- that’s plain to see. Still, after having achieved such affluence, why does he choose to spend the rest of his life in prison just to put paid to Eli Sunday, who is nothing more than a mosquito to him? One possible answer is that Plainview has lost his grip on an already-fragile sanity, and in fact, one of the movie’s most notable and enjoyable aspects is how colourfully Daniel Day-Lewis is able to portray swivel-eyed mania yet still (mostly) remain the right side of ham. Another possible answer is that there really is just something about Eli that touches Daniel on an extremely raw level- he might not even know quite why he hates him so much, and doesn’t necessarily care, but simply chooses to wallow in the hatred without analysing its causes. In the end, that may be his defining attribute- not his wealth, not his determination or drive, but his hatred for this little twerp, and in the end, it’s the hill he has chosen to (figuratively) die on.
David Denby of The New Yorker opines that There Will Be Blood is about ‘the driving force of capitalism as it creates and destroys the future’ and points out that ‘in [the characters’] undreamed-of future, Walmart is on the way’. He’s absolutely right, of course, though unlike Werckmeister Harmonies, the film strikes me as more than just a feature-length allegory and I think the characters and the narrative progression are not meant merely as symbols. Nevertheless, the ways in which Daniel Plainview represents capitalist thinking are thoroughly self-evident, both in a general sense with an attitude which disregards the wellbeing of anyone but himself and is characterised by naked greed, but more specifically when, through speeches that resemble advertisements, he pretends to be honest, trustworthy, and on the same page as the community, holding the same trenchant and upstanding values that they do and promising to work in tandem with them towards a common goal.
Here another potential reason for Daniel’s hatred for Eli can be put forth. One could suggest that the 20th century saw capitalism displace religion as the masses’ drug of choice, with huge supermarkets and shopping malls becoming, essentially, our new churches, and the two titans going head-to-head, especially when we consider that religion advocates a simple life of few possessions and comprehensively dismisses the kind of temporal gratification brought about by consumerism.
In any case, of the films that superseded my initial opinion of them from several years ago- Fish Tank, Children of Men, Spring Breakers, or to a much lesser extent, The Royal Tenenbaums- this was the one where the re-appraisal was the most dramatic. The most obvious reason for this would be that this time, I watched it through more mature, considered eyes, and though that’s certainly true, up to a point, it seems too pat an explanation for why my reaction was so different, as does the suggestion that I simply wasn’t ‘in the mood’ for the film first time around- if anything, I approached it with more reticence this time, discouraged even further by my dubious experience with The Master and my thoroughly exasperated one with Inherent Vice. Sometimes, of course, you just ‘get’ films much more when you watch them through again. Though I still don’t think it’s perfect- it lags somewhat in the middle, and the ‘brother’ sub-plot felt a little tangential- There Will Be Blood nonetheless comes highly recommended for the discerning moviegoer, as long as they don’t mind their cinema being scabrous, caustic, cavalier with tone and form, and containing nothing in the way of warmth.