Anderson: The Master (2012)

Like There Will Be Blood, The Master is a period piece about the decline and implosion of a magnetic, visionary, larger-than-life personality. In this case, it’s Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), leader of a post-WWII cult known as “The Cause,” who forms a volatile and ambiguous friendship with Freddie Quell (Joaquim Phoenix), a drifting, dissolute veteran. Poised somewhere between Scientology and the proliferation of post-war self-help movements, The Cause revolves around an unusual kind of reincarnation, whereby Lancaster entrances his acolytes into apprehending the textural traces of the past upon their immediate surroundings. Although there’s certainly a hypnotic element at play, Lancaster prefers to describe it as dehypnosis, an awakening – for him, the residues of the past are always here in the present, it’s just a matter of allowing them to become alive to us, and allowing ourselves to become alive to them. And Anderson follows suit, crafting a period drama that doesn’t quite attempt to recreate the past so much as to mesmerise it out of the present, shrouding our nostalgic preconceptions in the same blue-green murk as Lancaster’s sessions, only to puncture them with moments of sparkling lucidity. In other words, it’s a period drama about a figure who’s prescient that he will always be present, if only through the objects he leaves behind, the tiniest traces he’s committed to the world, folded back into the shadowy string of East Coast houses where his dehypnoses and domestic archaeologies occur. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t feel like there are really any private or public spaces in the film – every space is cast adrift from the normal balance of present and past, too present to feel private and too past to feel public, fixing the characters in the paradoxical poses of photographic portraiture, especially Freddie, who continually clenches the left side of his face, as if suffering a sustended stroke, or bracing himself against an imminent stroke. Apparently, Anderson was inspired by the fact that post-war periods often give rise to spiritual movements, but they’re also when people try and recalibrate the present – and few films return you as strangely to the present as this one; you emerge, dehypnotised, to a world that’s familiar, yet also has  “another feel to it that is so basic…colour with unfamiliar tones, a strange touch to the air.” Coming out of a film rarely collapses you back into it as completely as it does here, part of the paradox of a period drama that addresses every period as the present, and every present as its own: “Are you here with me, now, in 1950?”