New on DVD / VOD

Enlarge Image

conde nast Diana Vreeland at her desk at Vogue magazine.

Enlarge Image

Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in a scene from The Master. (CP)

The Master

It's doubtful writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson was looking to raise the litigious ire of the Church of Scientology with this story prominently featuring a bogus prophet clearly modelled after Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

As The Master unreels, it's clear Anderson is not terribly interested in the specifics of that religion -- he's more into exploring the loaded dynamic between the leader and the follower, the would-be prophet and the would-be apostle.

In the latter capacity, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is presented in the film's opening scenes as a profoundly lost soul. At the end of the Second World War, the damaged Freddie leaves the navy and drifts through a rootless civilian life. He doesn't stick with anything for too long, stymied by his natural tendency to anti-social behaviour and a penchant for brewing his own toxic moonshine from whatever fluids are close to hand.

On the lam from a misadventure, Freddie stows away on a passing ship bound for New York City under the benign command of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), evidently some kind of alpha-academic who introduces himself as a "writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher" with a ripe sense of self reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote's calling card: "Genius."

"But above all, I am a man."

The two men bond over Freddie's home brew, but their relationship quickly transmogrifies as Dodd employs his impressive hypnotic wiles to seduce Freddie to "The Cause," Dodd's all-inclusive name for his pseudo-scientific cult.

The film's tension is not in its plot, which meanders, but in these characters. Dodd's credo, which never fails to flatter the rich matrons he courts as patrons, is that humans are not part of the animal world, but are spiritual beings. But Dodd himself can't help but label Freddie a "silly, silly animal" when his troublesome convert reverts to self-gratifying behaviours (which he does frequently).

For his part, Freddie does grow into a loyalty for Dodd, the one man who seems to consider him a worthy human being. But Freddie's loyalty is animal loyalty; he physically lashes out at any skeptic who professes doubt for The Cause, even if Freddie is himself too disturbed or too thick to grasp its tenets.

As in Anderson's film There Will Be Blood, there is some strange, enigmatic content in this movie, especially in the film's final encounter between Dodd and Freddie. Take it however you like, it's the happiest ending you'll ever get in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. 'Ö'Ö'Ö'Ö

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

This is an amusing documentary about a one-time ugly duckling who grew up to swan her way through the world of high fashion, powered by the twin engines of confidence and style.

Vreeland may not have been an admirable woman in her capacity as a mother (her sons admit that, growing up, they wished she had been anyone's mother but theirs). But she was certainly admirable in the way she invented herself and wedged herself into a position of extraordinary influence as the editor of both Harpers Bazaar and Vogue.

The doc, incorporating interviews with Vreeland by the likes of Dick Cavett and George Plimpton, is an unfailingly entertaining illustration of getting ahead on sheer bravado. 'Ö'Ö'Ö

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 28, 2013 ??65520