The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson is arguably the finest film director working in the English language today. His work recalls the precocity of Welles, the verve of Scorsese and the meticulous grandeur of Kubrick, though it is Robert Altman's shadow that looms darkest - the sprawling allegorical narratives, the malaise-en-masse, that angry, American otherness. Most importantly, however, he has created and grown into his own distinctive cinematic grammar, which is both gloriously modern and reassuringly true to the intellectual rigour of seventies New Hollywood.

Anderson made ripples at Cannes in 1996 with his debut Hard Eight, a chamber-mooded, punchily performed crime drama. His follow-up Boogie Nights (1997) is Anderson's Mean Streets, a brash, bleak fantasia of lust and innocence lost. With its flawed grandiosity, dark Biblical tones and deadpan surrealism, Magnolia (1999) is a cinematic Tower of Pisa, a broad-canvas parable seared with modern frustrations. Punch Drunk Love (2002) is an arthouse photo negative of a typical Adam Sandler film, where a raging Sandler is, brilliantly, played for pathos rather than laughs. There Will Be Blood (2007) is a magisterial, seething epic poem of greed, guilt and fatherhood, and (along with Synecdoche, New York) the most impressive American film of the twenty-first century so far. 

The Master has been five years in the making, which has meant five years of fending off rather tiresome claims that it dared to critique the Church of Scientology: it's a shame that this, to many, is what the film will be known for, as it does infinitely more.

It is Anderson's maturest, strangest, most uplifting work to date, both more pared-down and more expansive than anything he's done so far. Joaquin Phoenix is Freddie Quell, a naval officer struggling to readjust to civilian life after the Second World War. He is an erratic, eccentric, addictive loner, not lucid or committed enough to be a Yossarian-type rebel-among-the-ranks: he sees genitalia in Rorschach tests, masturbates on the beach (like that other itinerant everyman, Leopold Bloom) and dry-humps women made of sand. One day, when a colleague dies after drinking Freddie's home-brewed hooch, he flees and stows away on a boat, where a wedding happens to be taking place. He is introduced to father-of-the-bride Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-styled polymath who immediately takes Freddie under his wing and into the bosom of his faintly cultish family of disciples. I won't say any more about the plot for two reasons: the first is it is so ambiguous I still haven't quite worked it out for myself; the second is it is almost incidental to what is really a triptych of character studies told through Pinteresque scenes of shifting power.

The film hangs on the dynamic between Phoenix and Hoffman, and it is completely intoxicating. Joaquin Phoenix gives the sort of performance that makes you slightly worry for his sanity: it shimmers with the danger and the volatility of a young De Niro, especially when he 'loses it' with a gentleman he is photographing in the mall, but it also has moments of considerable subtlety. Hoffman, on the other hand, has a stately, Wellesian control of his faculties: he invests Dodd with charm, authority, a disarming sense of humour, and a pedantic diction redolent of Daniel Day-Lewis' delivery in There Will Be Blood.

There is one scene in particular, where Phoenix and Hoffman are in adjacent prison cells, that crystallises their different acting styles. Phoenix is pure feverish id: he snarls and stumbles, kicks and claws, smacks the underside of the upper bunk with the back of his head like a chained bear, bites chunks out of the mattress, and smashes his porcelain basin. Hoffman barely moves throughout this: he leans on the bed and speaks gently, like a benign headmaster, until they start swearing at each other through the bars (expletive-filled arguments from protected positions seem to be an Andersonian leitmotif: two of the best are the fantastically rude phone call between Hoffman and Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love and Tom Cruise's outpouring to his barely conscious father in Magnolia).

The most powerful moment of the film comes when Hoffman first interrogates Phoenix. It starts tentatively and flippantly, with Phoenix farting and Hoffman warmly dismissing him as a "silly animal". When Phoenix begs to continue, Hoffman says he will, but this time, if he blinks, they have to start the questions from the beginning. What follows is four minutes of perfect cinema. It's perfect. It reminds you how good Phoenix can be, and wonder why it's taken him since Gladiator to be this good, but it also shows you how Anderson has evolved as a film-maker from his already assured early works.

The film carries a very fifties sadness, the same mix of stasis and upheaval you find in the literary works of Richard Yates or John Cheever, and the music enriches this. The soundtrack combines Jonny Greenwood's modernist, discordant strings-and-clunks with love songs from the time. Anderson said in a recent interview that the lyrics in post-war songs often refer to being reunited in another life with lost lovers, to dreams and ghosts (this gives Freddie's choice of film at the cinema, Caspar the Friendly Ghost, an added poignancy), and the use of these songs in the film reinforces the widespread emotional void the likes of Freddie and Lancaster attempt to fill with their own belief system.

There are other Andersonian preoccupations here. The danger of the preacher, at its most nuanced in Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd, rhymes with Tom Cruise's seduction guru in Magnolia and Paul Dano's wily pastor in There Will Be Blood. Freddie is debilitated by lust-induced guilt and longing, as are Julianne Moore, William H. Macy and Philip Baker Hall in Magnolia, as is Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights. When Hoffman makes Freddie walk from the wall to the window again and again in front of the family until he reaches some sort of breakthrough, it is the same subjugation tactic of public humiliation-dressed-up-as-atonement as Paul Dano uses on Daniel Day-Lewis in the famous 'I abandoned my boy!' scene in There Will Be Blood. But the hopeful, understated, ever so slightly unsettling end to The Master (in England, of all places) is unique within the Anderson canon.

In an article I wrote about Robert Altman last year, I suggested Paul Thomas Anderson was his mad, Smerdyakovian* heir. Now I feel he's even more than that, a sort of dark Messiah of American arthouse. We are very lucky to be alive at the same time as him. If you only see one film this year, this should be it.

* This is a reference to Dostoevsky and should be ignored.