It will be extremely difficult for a person to like this film, easy for them to love it, and even easier for them to passionately hate it. I fall into the middle category, though I must say that I found it a difficult and at times extremely uncomfortable movie-going experience. This is not something for the feint of heart, nor is it for a person resembling its main character, aggressive and easily manipulated. Paul Thomas Anderson has added to his small yet fantastically strong collection of films a piece that may challenge the way you view the medium altogether.
Reflection has done little good for me. My ideas are unclear, combating a swirling mixture of emotions, frustration, fear and delight. Anderson's perverse and hateful view of humanity which we first got a full taste of in his masterpiece "There Will Be Blood" is deepened in intensity in his loose depiction of the cult of Scientology.
A staggering triumph of craftsmanship, the United States of 1950 is reconstructed absolutely. It is crisp and modern, idyllic and beautiful on the surface, though there is something slightly off-putting about it. Perhaps it is not in the construction of the place, but rather its presentation. Fish-eye lenses, saturated colors and the jarring and ever present musical score from Jonny Greenwood turn harmless Navy boys into nameless enemies.
Freddie Quell is one these sailors, returning home from the war with a case of the nerves. Stumbling about, talking with slurred words and seeing out of one eye, the violent, deranged, sexually depraved man is an outcast of outcasts. Joaquin Phoenix gives what is quite possibly the performance of the year and easily the greatest of his career as a lost, crazed soul. He does not perform for his audience, he simply inhabits a screen. This is his world, immersed in a character who drinks paint thinner, peroxide and whatever liquid happens to leak out of torpedo; a vagabond and a killer whose purpose is pussy and whose means is his fist. It is a character study of epic proportions of an incredibly frightening man.
Two hours on Freddie alone would be engrossing in itself, but this man needs a purpose. Anderson brings him into the hands of Lancaster Dodd, a man of shining charisma who speaks in prose and whose eyes penetrates the soul. He is the Master, leader of The Cause, who with his wife (Amy Adams, in yet another superb performance), sets out to purify the souls of his following by bringing them into past lives extending back trillions of years (that's trillions with a "t"). One man with a broken mind should not fall into the hands of another with a silver tongue. But Freddie does, and we journey with him as he is broken with the arms of a congregation as dangerous as Freddie is.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is powerful as Freddie's foil. His false humor and his quick, easy explanations relieved me and made me trust him in spite of myself. Why Lancaster would take such an interest in Freddie I still do not know, but when these two acting greats face off in moments of stillness the air becomes too stifling to breathe. The two fall so deeply into their characters and rely so completely on one another that Anderson's words rise to the level of profundity.
I don't want to hyperbolize and frankly I don't think I have. What we have is the supreme work of an artist whose mind is so far beyond that of the average audience member that it becomes an exercise to keep up with him. Anderson manipulates his scenes so perfectly that they become hypnotic, brainwashing me as well, as I worked to process the great truths I was hearing. He has an audience in mind and this audience knows who they are. What worries me is that I might not be learned enough to fall into that category.
His two latest films are sisters, developing further his view of man as an animal. It is an alarming attack on the subconscious, and a transplendent vision perfectly executed. I don't know precisely what it all means to me personally, but it has gotten me thinking not only about the craftsmanship of the movie, but larger questions about life and relationships. To be able to get another person to do that is nothing short of genius.
4/4
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