newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

You can’t always get what you want, even with refined skills and a world of talent at hand.

As Lancaster Dodd, “The Master” of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman might be taken for a force of nature.

Seductively charming, whether with stories and songs, probing questions, hypnosis, psychoanalytical pseudo-science or bellicosity where indicated, Dodd relentlessly applies techniques to his audience and subjects.

The leader of a quasi-therapeutic philosophical group with the vague but stirring name of The Cause, Dodd dreams of writing his name large on history. Even if the Establishment, with its rigid insistence on reason and facts, pushes him toward the margins, Dodd will write there.

For beyond the official histories, recognized theories and authorized versions, there is a whole world of people living lives unnoted and usually unnoticed. Out here on the perimeter there are no stars. Perhaps this is the place for Dodd, for despite his claim of being a nuclear physicist and his ease as a raconteur, his ruminations drift from established orbits.

Yet he is a man of enormous will, capable of careful constructions, whether of substance or image. Dodd has one significant insight, the realization that many of us lack direction - and are willing to take it.

What happens when such an irresistible force as Lancaster Dodd meets an already moving object? Like “The Master,” it can be a long search for a fixed point. 

Freddie Quell washes up Dodd’s shore like a pointed stick. The point is Joaquin Phoenix’s chin, aimed directly at the camera. A World War II sailor with a perpetual forward lean, Freddie recalls that other Navy veteran, Popeye, but pre-spinach.

We have already seen Freddie taking things too far. When a fellow sailor builds a sandcastle in the shape of a naked woman on some sun-kissed Pacific beach, Freddie feels compelled to hump it, at least until the tide comes in.

Along with fellow casualties, Freddie receives perfunctory psychological treatment before discharge, with the reassurances that many civilians would have developed the same “nervous conditions” if subjected to similar pressures.

Was the war the start of Freddie’s problems, or merely a period when they were less noticeable? Working later as a department store photographer, he seems more interested in whipping up libations from darkroom chemicals, household cleaners, paint thinners or anything else alcoholic in any form.

His downwardly mobile employment trajectory is marked by a series of small explosions. Freddie does not always set them deliberately, but he always goes off. His approach to seducing non-sandy girls tends toward notes asking, “Do you want to fuck?” accompanied by a happy face.

So it’s a very strange sort of heaven when Freddie awakes from a spree on a yacht commanded by Lancaster Dodd, who is about to preside over the wedding of his daughter Elizabeth (Ambyr Childers) to his devoted acolyte Clark (Rami Malek).

Dodd always has an opening for another acolyte, and he’s already enjoyed Freddie’s latest batch of rocket-fuel hooch. For his part, hunched, mumbling Freddie clearly needs something.

“You’ll be my protégé and my guinea pig,” Dodd proclaims, with a jovial confidence that makes it seem more a promise than a threat.

In truth, those are just a few of the roles that the men slip into, while Hoffman and Phoenix conduct an acting master class. To commence, Hoffman is smooth and sharp, giving nothing away while flashing intelligence, British stage acting in the more intimate world of the camera.