Paul Thomas Anderson, director of The Master, an accidental auteur: Howell
Source: The Toronto Star
September 28, 2012 | Peter Howell
I was starting to think Paul Thomas Anderson was “processing” me, much the way cult inductees are in The Master, his cerebral workout of a new film.
Having played the “maybe” game for an in-person interview all during TIFF, which eventually became “maybe not,” word was that the elusive Anderson was suddenly available for a telephone chat.
Then the appointed hour comes and goes, and there’s no call from PTA and no immediate explanation from either his Canadian or U.S. publicists for his absence.
Ninety minutes later, a misdialed telephone is blamed and a contrite Anderson is on the line: “Hey Peter, it’s Paul. Sorry about everything.”
Apology accepted. And it immediately occurs to me that much about Anderson is open to wild interpretation in the wake of The Master, a film that resists easy analysis.
The story of an uncommon bond between a feral sailor (Joaquin Phoenix) and a cerebral cult guru (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has a father-figure dynamic common to Anderson’s work, right back to his 1996 debut Hard Eight (a.k.a. Sydney).
But the nut of The Master, his sixth feature, doesn’t crack open as easily as Anderson’s earlier films, which also include There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and Boogie Nights. There are long passages that don’t necessarily lead anywhere, the female characters are blurred, (especially Amy Adams’ whore/Madonna figure), and the resolution is unconventional, to say the least.
