Film Friday: The Master (2012)

I’m going to save you two hours of your life: don’t see this film. This isn’t a film, it’s an exercise in acting. It’s a meandering biography of an unlikable fictional character and it tries to explain its own indulgences as being an examination of post traumatic stress syndrome. It’s critic bait.

** Spoiler Alert **

The Master was marketed as being a thinly-veiled, warts-and-all unauthorized biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Actually, let me rephrase that. The Master was marketed as NOT being a thinly-veiled, warts-and-all unauthorized biography of L. Ron Hubbard... wink wink. They even went so far as to mention at every turn that Scientologists were upset about what this film would reveal and the director personally screened the film for Tom Cruise as a peace offering. Essentially, they sold this as a Scientology exposé by denying that’s what it was.

Well, I don’t know if the character of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is anything like L. Ron Hubbard, but it doesn’t really matter. He never purports to run a religion. The film doesn’t delve into whatever Scientology is really about. And the film only focuses on Dodd tangentially.

What this film is about is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a sex-obsessed, alcoholic World War II vet. The story opens with Freddie in the Navy where he seems like a weirdo who humps a sand sculpture. Quell gets discharged and we’re told he has been diagnosed with a condition that the public will consider “cowardice.” They are talking about post traumatic stress syndrome, though they don’t name it. Quell then gets a series of jobs and ruins them all with bizarre acts like picking a fight with a customer in a department store. He romances a couple women and leaves them. Then he kills a Mexican farm worker in Salinas with bad moonshine, and he hides on a ship to escape.

It turns out this ship is being captained by Lancaster Dodd, who runs a sort of cult that seems to be based around garbage psychology. In fact, the way Dodd comes across is as a caricature of a Hollywood Psychiatrist who does bizarre things like ask the same question twenty times just to test your answer and then asks you how you feel. It’s nonsense.

Dodd befriends Freddie and takes him in. Freddie then repeatedly defends Dodd from disloyal followers and outside skeptics by beating them up as Dodd moves pointlessly through the plot. If he’s building a church, you don’t see it. All you see is the interaction of Dodd and Freddie and Freddie fighting people who denigrate Dodd. Eventually, the film ends at an arbitrary point in Freddie’s life.

Why This Sucks

Let me start by telling you how most critics responded, because that might tell you what the problem is here. No doubt they watched this film having no idea what was going on. Little is explained and the focus of the film is on Freddie’s erratic behavior, which is basically the entirety of the plot. Then the credits start rolling. The critics look around and see the angry looks on the faces of the proles, so they instinctively jump up and applaud like Ruby Rhod’s sycophants in The Fifth Element:

“Oh my! Now I know what anguish feels like!” gushes one critic.

“I have truly learned something about the human condition!” gushes another.

“Yes, I am a better person for watching this film,” replies the first.

Meanwhile, the actors are giving interviews in which they all say, “I wanted to do this because this is a real actor’s film.” Translation: It’s melodrama pretending to be insightful. The public? Well, this $32 million film grossed all of $28 million and it wouldn’t have done that without the deception of the supposed Scientology exposé.

Here’s the thing. Biographies are often lousy films because a human life is not amenable to compelling storytelling. Sure, there are parts of our lives that would make excellent stories, but not our whole lives at once. So from the get go, this is problematic being essentially a biography. Director Paul Thomas Anderson tries to fix this by limiting the film to a small time period in Freddie’s life: the relationship between Freddie and Dodd. Unfortunately, Anderson still fails to give us a compelling storyline. Instead, we just see a series of five or six minute long incidents that involve Freddie misbehaving and Dodd responding to that. So again, there is no real plot... it’s just an outline of moments, and the moments are so small and insignificant that they don’t form a plot, just a picture of Freddie as pathetic.

This is a real lost opportunity given the suggestion that the film was a thinly-veiled exposé on Scientology. If the film had been about Dodd or the construction of his cult, then it might have been interesting. You could watch step by step as the group is formed, expands and corrupts. But it’s not. To the contrary, you barely get a sense that Dodd is anything more than a blowhard surrounded by a handful of friends. You get a couple hints that he’s a fraud, but nothing clear. You learn nothing about his organization or its scope. Instead, you just get the biography on a fictional person who is only tangential to the exposé.

Even worse, the film tries a couple times to wedge in this idea that the reason Freddie is so pathetic is that he’s suffering from his exposure to war. This is a popular theme in Hollywood right now and they are trying to work it into films, particularly films about World War II. Thus, characters periodically say things like, “The war taught us to fight, and now that’s all we know.” But see, here’s the problem: (1) we never get a baseline to tell us that Freddie wasn’t pathetic before, and (2) his only evidence of having mental problems is that he’s a belligerent assh*le. So that doesn’t wash. Nor is any real point made about this, e.g. there’s no solution offered, so it feels gratuitous.

To add insult to injury, the film ends in a way which implies that the whole thing was a dream Freddie had as he humped a sand sculpture... clearly an analogy of what the film is doing to the audience.

This film goes wrong on so many levels. For one thing, it never builds a plot. It wrongly assumes that a series of five minute vignettes is good enough. And while that can work if the vignettes are interesting, these aren’t. Rather than being mini-stories, these vignettes are just moments of Freddie misbehaving. It doesn’t help that Freddie isn’t a real person either or that he ends up being tangential to the thing that was used to hook people into seeing the movie. Even worse, little is communicated to the audience. There are long periods without dialog, the characters don’t explain what is going on around them or in their lives, and even the relationships of the characters aren’t clear. Nor does it help that all this craziness Freddie does might have been shocking to an audience in the 1950s, but reeks of Oscar-bait acting today.

Unless you need to see an example of crazy, say to help you fail a disability test, then avoid this film.

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Film Friday: The Village (2004)

I wanted to like The Village so much. After The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and even Signs, M. Night Shyamalan had won me over, even if his films weren’t as well received by the public as they should have been. But The Village never worked. It started well, but it fell apart quickly and it just kept getting worse.

** heavy spoiler alert **

The Plot

The Village is an odd story about a group of people who live in a village surrounded by a vast forest. The film appears to take place in the 1880s or in a world where humanity has been reduced to the technological and cultural level of the 1880s. Indeed, these people have no modern machinery, no cars, no electricity and no modern medicine. They also dress like Mennonite farmers and they talk like caricatures of the 1880s. The story centers around Ivy Elizabeth Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), who can best be described as Tom Sawyer in a dress. Ivy is the daughter of the village leader Edward Walker (William Hurt), and she is blind.

As the story begins, we are told that the forest is controlled by evil creatures the villagers call “Those We Do Not Speak Of.” These creatures wear red cloaks and look something like wild boars. And apparently, there is some truce which involves the villagers staying out of the forest so the monsters won’t raid the village. But then there is an attack. In the meantime, a love story has arisen between Ivy and Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix). Lucius wants to brave the forest to get medicine from some nearby town to stop children from dying from common illnesses. The village elders forbid this. But then Lucius gets stabbed by Noah Percy (Adrien Brody), a retarded man. He is dying. So the elders decide to let Ivy venture to the town to get medicine to save him. That’s when the “big” secret gets revealed.

The Problems

Like I said, I wanted to like this film a lot. And the beginning of the film has a neat vibe to it that does present you with an interesting world that pulls you into the story, even if the dialog feels oddly stilted. Soon, however, the plot falls off the rails. And the reason it does this is because Shyamalan couldn’t decide what he really wanted to make. Did he want a horror movie? A romance? A tale of evil? A psychological thriller? Yeah, sort of.

The ultimate problem with The Village is that Shyamalan never picks a single genre which will drive the film. Instead, the film meanders between genres. By failing to pick a dominant genre, Shyamalan ends up creating a film which dabbles in several genres but never does any of them effectively. For example, the idea of the creatures in the woods is truly terrifying. And when they first appear, you really do get the makings of a heck of a horror movie. But that idea resolves itself without ever delivering a real bang. The romance between Ivy and Lucius starts well enough as well. You like both characters and you see how their relationship will ultimately prove to be satisfying once they overcome the obstacles in their path. This is a classic romantic premise and you feel like you are on your way to an exceptional romance. But that never goes anywhere either.

Both of these storylines basically stop when Lucius gets stabbed. At that point, a new storyline begins which asks whether or not the people who created the village have done something truly evil to the kids who are stuck in the village. But frustratingly, the film never delves into that either. It sets it up and it spends a few minutes batting the idea back and forth, but before this issue can be explored to any degree, the film shifts to Ivy walking through the woods to save Lucius.

This is a storytelling disaster. At each phase, you are presented with a story that you instinctively know has been very well setup and could be a great story – a horror film, a romance, and psychological thriller/tale of evil. But each time, right after the setup, the film cuts off that storyline and starts a new one. Thus, you get a horror film which becomes a romance before it unleashes any horror, and the romance becomes a psychological thriller before it give you any romantic payoff, and the psychological thriller morphs into “blind girl walking through the woods” before the issues are even fully established. This is highly frustrating.

For one thing, this wastes all the investment in the horror and romance storylines because they prove meaningless to the story. For another, the blind girl walking through the woods is the weakest storyline, so focusing on that is a huge mistake. Moreover, if anything in this film could be called a common theme, it is the storyline questioning whether or not the adults have been justified in their deceptions. That is the only storyline that really is relevant in each part of the film. BUT, once their deception is revealed, i.e. right when you expect the payoff to this story, the film shifts to blind girl walks through the woods, and all the questions that were raised by the actions of the adults get dropped, if they even got asked. This is like watching the first two thirds of a Twilight Zone only to have the last third be replaced by something from another drama. It’s completely unsatisfying.

Further, this structure undermines the big twist Shyamalan drops at the end. When the blind girl makes it through the forest, we suddenly learn the BIG secret about the adults. This secret is meant to shock the audience and to cast everything the audience has seen in a new light. But because this relates to the storyline which was already dropped by the time the secret is revealed, it lacks punch. A twist simply won’t work when it doesn’t relate to the story that is on people’s minds at the moment, and when this twist arises, the only thing the audience is left with is “girl walking through the woods.” Each of the other stories ended by that point.

Mixing genres is one of the hardest things to do in storytelling. Unless you really are an expert in both genres and you are a talented enough storyteller to bring those two storylines together seamlessly, then what you end up with is a story that is neither fish nor fowl and satisfies no one. Shyamalan’s problem is in the mixing. Indeed, his problem isn’t that he couldn’t have told a horror story, a romance, or a psychological thriller. Clearly he could, as each of these started quite promisingly. But rather than weave them together to create one overall film, he just runs them in series and cuts them off when he needs to start the next one. Thus, you end up with three partial stories and one complete story, none of which satisfy. Had Shyamalan actually brought them all together, The Village might have been his best film. Instead, it was just another Shyamalan film that didn’t live up to the hype.

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