Phoenix and Hoffman defend the faith in The Master.

««« The Master. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

That there's never been a major Hollywood movie about L. Ron Hubbard is not  
an accident. As detailed in Jon Atack's scary expose A Piece of Blue Sky,  
Hubbard and the Church of Scientology have been persistent, aggressive, and  
shameless in their use of the courts to intimidate their critics. Even the  
IRS has been in the organization's cross-hairs at one point: a strategy  
that, as Bill Clinton has said in another context, “takes brass.” To take  
on that particular story too directly is to run the risk of nuisance suits,  
petty harassment, and even death threats. Hubbard himself wrote in 1960:  
“If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any  
organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to  
cause them to sue for peace.”

But the rise of Hubbard from failed naval officer to Grade Z science  
fiction writer to prophet of his own religion is also a quintessentially  
American story. All at once, it reflects the popular myth of the  
entrepreneur, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, and the particularly  
American trait of innovating religious “technologies” as ingenious as any  
of the creature comforts of modernity. Whether we are speaking of  
Scientology or Mormonism or any of the other peculiarly American “faiths”,  
the distinction between inspiration and hucksterism can look awfully  
subtle. Declared Hubbard, “Writing science fiction for about a penny a word  
is no way to make a living. If you really want to make a million, the  
quickest way is to start your own religion.” By some accounts, he even  
wagered Robert Heinlein (or is it Isaac Asimov?) that he could—out of whole  
cloth. It might be said that Hubbard officially won when the IRS granted  
tax-exempt status to the Church of Scientology in 1993.

This landscape of big American myths is familiar territory Paul Thomas  
Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). His towering There Will Be Blood (2007)  
first mythologized, then deconstructed the kind of industrial titan  
(otherwise known as “job creator”) beloved of Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan.  
Religion figured in that story too, in the person of Daniel Day-Lewis'  
nemesis, the boy-preacher played by Paul Dano. But Anderson takes on the  
cross-pollination of commerce and religion more directly in his latest, The  
Master.

Observing the better part of valor, Anderson has prudently avoided making  
his film about Hubbard himself. But the veil is thin: like Hubbard, his  
“Lancaster Dodd” (Philip Seymour Hoffman) finds fertile ground for converts  
among men and women adrift in the wake of World War II. Instead of  
Hubbard's Dianetics, Dodd has invented a science of psychobabble he calls  
the Method which, like Hubbard's, involves a series of structured  
interviews (“auditing” in Scientology, called “processing” here). Like his  
inspiration, Dodd is can be smart, charming, and even self-effacing. But he  
is also, like Hubbard, desperately thin-skinned, to the point of full-blown  
paranoia. If anything, Hoffman plays this crypto-Hubbard too  
sympathetically, never stooping to the out-and-out contempt for the people  
he cajoles into signing “billion-year contracts” for all their money.

Yet Anderson doesn't think the key to understanding this story really lies  
with Lancaster Dodd. Instead, The Master is really about Freddie Quell  
(Joaquin Phoenix), a Navy wash-out and devoted alcoholic who drifts from  
job to job until he impulsively climbs aboard Dodd's flagship. From there,  
he simultaneously becomes the Master's enforcer and persistent critic—he  
knows very well that Dodd is making up his religion as he goes along, but  
the privilege of “belonging”, even to an elaborate con, is too seductive to  
walk away from.

Phoenix is terrific in this role. Not unlike the persona he adopted for  
Walk the Line, his Johnny Cash bio-pic, Phoenix fashions Freddie Quell by  
an almost sculptural twisting and rending of—well—himself. You're never  
quite sure this is a plausible human being here, but Phoenix plays him, and  
Anderson shoots him in such searching, unflinching long takes, that it  
doesn't matter.

By making Phoenix's character the touchstone of his movie, Anderson is  
saying that an “origin story” of a thing like Scientology (or indeed, any  
religion) misses the point. What gives the thing its power is not where it  
comes from, but how it is perceived, and by whom. Lancaster Dodd, though  
impressive and expansive and ingenious, is less important to the success of  
his endeavor than his smaller, meaner followers, like Freddie Quell. In  
this, Anderson undercuts the myth of the master entrepreneur as deftly as  
he did in There Will Be Blood.

Plausible as all that is, it leaves a void in the center of The Master that  
dissatisfies. I like to think this was intentional—the narrative equivalent  
of the empty room in the center of the Temple in Jerusalem, where the less  
sophisticated imagined the Holy of Holies would lie. But there's no  
escaping the suspicion that Anderson has pulled his punches here, for  
obvious reasons. Some sacred cows kick, and they kick hard.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

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Posted By Nicholas Nicastro to VIZ.arts at 10/31/2012 07:17:00 PM