The Master poster
The background
Following the critical success of 2007’s There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson premiered his latest cinematic venture, a gripping tale of a burgeoning cult in post war America, at the Venice Film Festival this weekend. The Master promised many things, above all a long awaited return to acting from Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in the strange faux documentary I’m Still Here ) and a thinly-veiled expose of Scientology. But it seems that Anderson’s film has delivered much more than expected, with critics lauding praise upon his tale of a lost Navy veteran Freddie Quell (Phoenix) who finds himself in the psychological clutches of enigmatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman).
‘Simply unmissable’
The New York Times heralded the successful reception of Anderson’s film at Venice this weekend, reporting that the premiere audience were cheering on their feet. The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin was one of this vast collection of critics rushing to heap praise upon the film. Collin found it a welcome anecdote to, what he dubbed the “flavourless” fare at Venice this year. The Master “goes down like a gut-scorching slug of firewater,” exclaimed Collin, who declared that, “after one viewing, The Master already feels like a landmark American movie. It makes words like ‘bold’ and ‘extraordinary’ seem utterly inadequate.”
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called the film “simply unmissable” and praised Joaquin Phoenix’s lead performance as “quite different from and in advance of anything he has given us before, an achievement that puts him on a par with the young Pacino or De Niro.”
A masterful portrait of the cult
The Master was long suspected of being a pointed expose of the roots of Scientology, notably its post-war founder L. Ron Hubbard, who Anderson cited as a direct inspiration at the Venice Press Conference. Yet The Hollywood Reporter said it was “not the Scientology exposé everyone was expecting… if Anderson had really wanted to mine the early days of Scientology, he could have had a much juicier film, what with all the sexual shenanigans, legal scrapes, boldface lies and exaggerations that are part of the organization’s past. If anything, Scientology gets off easy here.”
Variety was quick to point out that “The Master is no mere muckraking expose.” Instead, it praised the film’s treatment of Dodd’s cult as similar to Anderson’s lauded work on There Will be Blood: “The Master shares with that 2007 picture an unrelenting focus on a borderline sociopath, a deeply scarred individual who craves a certain form of validation, yet proves mentally and emotionally incapable of receiving it from a community whose own motivations are thoroughly suspect.”
Puzzling at times
The Evening Standard issued a more cautious review of the film, calling it “slightly lumbering” and “nothing like as bravura as Magnolia” whilst The Guardian conceded it may “alienate and exasperate some.” The Hollywood Reporter summarised The Master as: “A film overflowing with qualities but also brimming with puzzlements… an argument that will endure for as long as people feel like seeing and talking about the film is whether it adds up to the sum of its many brilliant parts.”
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