The Master: Notes on an Ideological Reading of a Pop-Freudian America

The Master

Written and Directed By: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Jesse Plemons, Ambyr Childers, Christopher Evan Welch, Amy Ferguson, and Laura Dern

Director of Photography: Mihai Malaimare Jr., Editors: Leslie Jones and Peter McNulty, Production Designer: David Crank and Jack Fish, Original Music: Jonny Greenwood

Some mild spoilers follow, but I left it pretty opaque.

            The key to unlocking The Master, an intensely psychological portraiture of one of the darker sides of Americana, may be in Joaquin Phoenix’s right eye. As the misguided and confused Freddy Quell, Phoenix’s eye remains barely open, an opaque darkness coming through, but no sense of light. And then, compelled by the film’s titular character, it quivers and moves. Perhaps there is something in there. Until it regresses back onto itself, as beast, like the rest of Quell, which cannot be controlled.

            If Paul Thomas Anderson could have any dead soul watch his latest film, it should certainly be the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs. No one knew the power of the close-up in the way Balázs describes on his writings on film and specifically microphysiognomy as he called it. So much has been made in cinephile circles about the use of 65mm cameras to shoot The Master, a format usually reserved for large epics across oceans and deserts. Anderson’s film features the occasional shot of those, but what becomes clear very soon is that he wants to use the format for the close-up, to capture every detail on the faces of his characters. The most mild gesture, one surely missed by 35mm and certainly digital, is often the essential stroke in unlocking the movements of this grand film that refuses any sort of simplistic categorization.

            What separates The Master from Anderson’s previous film, There Will Be Blood, is his decision to move into the cerebral. There Will Be Blood is a film essentially about the structures of institutions—business, both capital and religion—that opens itself to expressive images that made this connection clear. But film as a medium, based in its spatial existence, can only peer so far into human consciousness. This is perhaps why Anderson has created two such enigmatic characters that seem to be both signifier and signified—they act as emblems, sometimes too obvious, for their greater movements in the post-war American landscape, but they also become characters fighting toward own volition, attempting to redefine themselves as greater movements.

The Ides of March: A Primary Fable

The Ides of March

Directed By: George Clooney

Written By: George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willmon, based on the play “Farragut North” by Willmon

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, George Clooney, Evan Rachel Wood, Marissa Tomei, Jeffery Wright, Max Minghella, and Jennifer Ehle.

Director of Photography: Phedon Papmichael, Editor: Stephen Mirrione, Production Designer: Sharon Seymour, Original Music: Alexandre Desplat

Rated: R for the things politicians say off camera

            You can tell a lot about the different tone being set by The Ides of March from the play that inspired it, Farragut North, by just examining the titles. The original play, a sparse Mametesque back room politics piece, has a title that refers to the subway stop in Washington DC where all the big lobbyist and consulting firms have their offices on K Street, which is where politicians go to die when they never make it to Capital Hill. But in George Clooney’s take on the material, we instead have a more metaphorical title, one that dates back multiple millennia in politics. We essentially have a fable.

            And it is this sort of morality tale that Mr. Clooney, not only playing an Obama-esque politician (one that remained off stage in the play) but also writing and directing, wishes to tell. Mr. Clooney may be one of the biggest actors still today, but his craft as a director of cinema has become more refined with each film. He seems to dig into these old genres and stories that cold have easily been made in eras previous, doing little to update them, but make the movies he wants to see. Thus, The Ides of March is an often gorgeously crafted examination of the dirty little schemes that hide under the skin of every politician. 

Moneyball: Computing for the Fences

Moneyball

Directed By: Bennett Miller

Written By: Steve Zallian and Aaron Sorkin

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Pratt, Robin Wright, and Kerris Dorsey.

Director of Photography: Wally Pfister, Editor: Christopher Tellefsen, Production Designer: Jess Gonchor, Original Music: Mychael Danna

Rated: PG-13 for the naughty words sometimes said on the field.

            Moneyball seems like the type of film made just for my own personal pleasure. It’s a baseball film (check), but not a conventional sports movie (check). Instead it deals with minutiae (check) that was seen as a rational approach to a game built on emotions (check), and it’s really about nerds attempting to take over the house (check). This is a film that may scare plenty of audiences—it’s about baseball statistics, after all—but has been artfully crafted for both mainstream and art house appeal. This ain’t no field of dreams.

The film, directed by Bennett Miller, is (loosely) adapted from Michael Lewis’s non-fiction bestseller, but has instead used the statistics story as a structure to approach a more classical underdog story. It’s the story of the 2002 Oakland A’s, a paltry baseball team with a payroll of just under $40 million. In the opening scenes, we watch the 2001 A’s get trampled on by the Yankees, a team with three times the amount of payroll. We watch Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the A’s general manager, attempting to stay away from the game. He keeps a radio on him, and can’t help but turn it on every once or so, eventually deciding to stomp it to death instead. Billy likes to win, bur what he can’t stand, is losing, and decides he’ll do anything to prevent that.