THE MASTER

There are many key moments in 'The Master', Paul Thomas Anderson's stomach-punching, fingernails-down-a-chalkboard psychological thriller loosely based on the founding of Scientology, but more deeply understood as a tale of two egos. We witness a titanic battle for self-control by a man who knows nothing of it (Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell), or to distinguish imagination from delusion by a man whose simmering rage emanates perhaps from the terror that the truth he has found may not be enough (Philip Seymour Hoffman's L Ron Hubbard surrogate, Lancaster Dodd). Neither of them know how to love; both are desperate to be loved; they find in each other a conversation partner, a patient, an unrequited lover. They are two of the most human characters the movies have brought us; their power trips are terrifying, because they may remind us of our own. There are many key moments - the first meeting between the war veteran and new religious leader, the dictator bonding with his subject over mutual substance abuse; when the master holds court in New York society, first offering tender words of potential healing to a grand dame, then exploding at a guest who dares question the source of his 'knowledge'; when the protege is experimented with, commanded to walk up and down between a wall and a window until he is both capable of imagining unbridled freedom, and driven nearly mad in the process; a science fiction-esque digging of buried treasure on an Arizona flat bed that could pass for Mars. Striking moments, but the one that remains most resonant in my memory after two viewings is still the most ambiguous. After Freddie and Dodd first meet, the new father invites the new son (the relationship, and the failings of relationship, between fathers and sons is where this film really aches) to attend his daughter's wedding. The invitation is accompanied either by a warning, or an invocation: Dodd tells him either 'Your memories aren't welcome' or 'Your memories are welcome'. Two viewings leaves it unclear - and I could check, but it doesn't really matter; for each is a blessing. You don't have to carry your trauma always and everywhere, or at least it doesn't always have to weigh as much; or you can join this community and still be fully yourself. It's a mark of the moral complexity of 'The Master' that it can critique the damage done by demonic religion while here honoring the best hopes of its angelic shades. The movie's not really about Scientology per se, but power and love. Like 'Andrei Rublev' it's too big a film to be interpreted in a review. It needs to be seen; deserves to be studied; and invites a response in life as well as words.

It's the Movies' Fault/It's Not the Movies' Fault

Three viewings of The Dark Knight Rises leave me feeling that this film has been over-watched but under-interpreted. Its release was, of course, briefly overshadowed by the terrible murders in Aurora, CO, but hand-wringing about the movies/violence, or about gun ownership/gun homicide quickly gave way to the rest of the summer movie season. Dialogue about a character committed to non-lethal restraint in his attempt at loving a city was superseded by repeat visits to Finding Nemo, explorations of financial corruption in Arbitrage, the magnificent humanist drama Beasts of the Southern Wild, the moral force of metaphor for unthinking nationalism Killer Joe, the delicate harshness of childhood in Moonrise Kingdom, the moving journey into memory and love of Robot & Frank, the glorious, extravagant vistas of Samsara, the surprising mercies of Searching for Sugarman, the morose yet tender self-reflection of Sleepwalk with Me, and the amusing but cheap political shots of The Campaign. Yet the Dark Knight is still rising, the debates about guns and movies and killing are still waiting to be had, families in Colorado are still grieving. So if we're going to take cinema seriously - which, if you believe in the power of art to interweave with autobiography, is indivisible from taking life seriously - we're going to have to keep talking about Batman's bad summer.

In the aftermath of the shootings, the debate about guns remained fixated on the understandable but superficial talking point polarities of "Ban them!" on the one hand and "Guns don't kill people!" on the other; meanwhile, movies were largely either blamed for everything (in puritanical quarters), or responsibility denied (in liberal ones). A sign of light emerged when mogul Harvey Weinstein called for a summit of his colleagues - the Scorseses and the Tarantinos and so on - to discuss violence in their movies, and its potential impact on the world outside the theatre.

Read the rest of this article at the Brehm Center Reel Spirituality blog

Making Good Experience out of a Bad Column

The rather-too-accurately named 'Vulture' section of the New York magazine website posted a piece about 'Worst moviegoing experiences' a while back. It's funny, snarky, sad. I've had my share of disappointments - dirty theaters, unhelpful staff, and most of all BAD PROJECTION AND SOUND PRECEDED BY TWENTY MINUTES OF ADVERTISING I'M PAYING TO SEE AND HAVE TO SIT THROUGH IF I WANT TO ENSURE HAVING A REMOTELY COMFORTABLE VIEWING ANGLE. But... In Kansas City's Tivoli cinema, in the summer of 1996, a man lifted his arms in the air during the climactic scenes of 'Basquait', physically enacting the awe he - and I think I - were feeling.

In the Max Linder Kinopanorama, in the summer of 1998, I sat in the middle balcony, which put me eye level with Peter O'Toole, holding a burning match til it wore down to his fingertips; when he blew it out and we cut to the desert horizon, we were only ten minutes into 'Lawrence of Arabia', but I gasped out loud for beauty.

In Prague, in the summer of 1997, I sat with an audience who got the jokes in 'Everyone Says I Love You', three seconds before I did, revealing one of the peculiar consequences of not understanding the language the subtitles are written in.

In what was then the MGM Multiplex in Belfast, on its opening afternoon, the projectionist switched off the end credits to 'The Thin Red Line' after a breath or two; I asked the usher to let me see the rest of the movie; she made a call, and invited me to return to my seat for a private viewing.

In Belfast's Waterfront Hall, I saw Howard Shore conduct the Ulster Orchestra backing Ornette Coleman and a print of Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'. In the same venue a few years later, the bass of Philip Glass' score for 'Koyaanisqatsi' thudded through my chest while his ensemble played alongside the film.

I saw 'There Will Be Blood' at the Savoy in Dublin, and noted the irony of the film's last line (possible - but not much of a - spoiler ahoy) - an old, broken, broken, broken man saying 'I'm finished' - when contrasted with the sheer aliveness of the lumberjack-shirted, both-earringed, porkpie-hatted, face-besmiled Daniel Day-Lewis who bounded down the theatre steps immediately thereafter.

I staggered out of the Edinburgh Film House breathing in large gulps after the devastating final sequence of Carlos Reygadas' 'Japon'; and in the same building saw Emily Blunt for the first time - on screen and, after the UK premiere of 'My Summer of Love', standing right in front of me; and in the Queens Film Theatre in Belfast spent most of cinema's centenary year - 1995 - discovering that watching 'Dr Strangelove' or 'Aguirre The Wrath of God' or 'Cabaret' or 'The Battle of Algiers' in a cinema compares with watching on TV much the same way as visiting the Pyramids is related to seeing a mummy or a photograph of the Rosetta Stone in a museum.

The 'New York' piece is mildly amusing, but appears to me mostly as the thin end of the wedge in a popular culture where snark competes with dehumanization and revenge for the monopoly on our attention. How's about a piece on the BEST experiences any of us have had in a cinema? Thoughts, anyone?

Weekend & The Game

Criterion has the difficult task of marketing two films with exactly the same title, released on BluRay a month apart. The first, 'Weekend', Andrew Haigh's moving and honest depiction of love, not at first sight, but at first couple of days hanging out together, earns its distinction of being one of the few contemporary films to get the typically pristine and engaging treatment only Criterion and Eureka can muster in the US or UK. What's striking about 'Weekend' is how its tale of two guys falling for each other is far more sexually explicit that 'Brokeback Mountain', yet the gender of the protagonists is taken for granted. Things have changed - the gay identity of the characters is handled subtly, shown, not told, not made into the reason for the film's existence. 'Weekend' could pass as the first widely seen British gay love story that allows itself to be as much about the love and the story as the gay. An entirely different kind of emotional honesty is on display in 'The Game', one of my guilty pleasures, also released on Criterion BluRay this past week. Spoiler avoidance is well nigh impossible in any review that wants to explore the themes of a film in which Michael Douglas is invited to take part in a puzzle he doesn't understand and ends up being much more (and less) than it seems. So I'll try to avoid giving the film's title away and just say that as a parable for descent into the psychic shadow, and a proposition for changing direction, 'The Game's as good as the story of Jacob Marley's former business partner.

Both editions carry handsome extras - particularly notable is Haigh's discussion of avoiding homocliche, and Douglas' surprisingly vulnerable contributions to the audio commentary.

The Dark Knight Rises

When a film ends with a passage quoted from 'A Tale of Two Cities', implicit permission is granted to begin its review thus: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times - a morally serious movie being released to huge acclaim, massive audiences, philosophical exploration, knee jerk misunderstanding, and most horrifying, but all too believably, the murder of twelve people hoping to be among the first to see it. In that light, 'The Dark Knight Rises' perfectly captured the zeitgeist: maybe it was 9/11, maybe it was Diana's death, but at some point in this generation, the 24 hour news cycle started eating its tail, both feeding and nurturing the appetite for things to be categorized (and, frequently, avenged) before they had been understood, or in some cases, before they had even happened. A Presidential election could be stolen, and give way to two wars against two nations (and the rules of war) in vengeance for a crime committed by people from neither nation, without anything like the appropriate outrage, resistance or lament; art events of global significance could be forgotten before they had the chance to be reflected on; and a mentally unstable man could fall through the cracks of a broken healthcare system, and choose to respond preemptively to a film that challenges our addiction to violence, by murdering a dozen people watching that film, before he had seen it himself. Ironically, one element of an antidote to the react first, ask questions later cultural sickness we suffer from was the production process for the recent Batman films - with years-long meditative gaps between the three of these immense-scale, operatic-philosophical, almost docu-dramatic comic book films. Director and co-writer Christopher Nolan brings a distinctively British sensibility to an American tale: the fine line between duty and obsession, and between service and self-care are central, English accents echo in the background of a story that includes implicit reference to both a terror campaign reminiscent of the IRA's killing of public figures, and a political response that prefers snap judgements and civil rights-infringing security 'solutions' over accountable criminal justice mechanisms paralleled with reasoned exploration of the unjust power foundations of why some people create chaos for others; not to mention the fact that the grey Gotham sky always threatens a Manchester rainstorm.

It used to be that the answer to the impact of the French revolution (explicitly evoked here, not just in the Dickens quotation, but also both in the portrayal of a popular uprising against the aristocracy - including nuanced visions of good rich people like Bruce Wayne/Batman who uses his power to defend the vulnerable, and attractive blue collar people like Selina Kyle/Catwoman who ultimately self-criticizes her own dehumanizing of the powerful) was to echo Chou en Lai's 1976 shibboleth that it was 'too soon to say'. Chou may have been an apologist for Mao's genocide, but he also understood, with WB Yeats, that good things 'come dropping slow'. Life deserves to be treated with quiet respect; time is required to make sense of it.

So who knows if 'The Dark Knight Rises' - some kind of extraordinary film, a thrilling night at the movies, a humane cry for a better way than ultraviolent ultraspectacle : demanding that people take responsibility for their own lives, to take a second look at the human faces behind the media's monsterization of people who hurt people, to wonder if the line between good and evil runs through each of - and not between - us, and ultimately positing the notions that hope and despair need each other, that a certain amount of fear (humility) is necessary for true courage to take flight, and fear of death to make life worth living, non-lethal, thought-through, self-costing (but rewarding) intervention is the only thing that works over the long term, and that such action can only emerge from what the New Testament defines as obedience learned 'through things suffered' - will last as a work of art, or be remembered primarily as the occasion for mass murder in a movie theater? It's too soon to say. This interim report would guess that it hasn't been understood yet - that despite its minimal role for women, and tendency to bite off more than it can chew, 'The Dark Knight Rises' may ultimately be seen as the capstone of the most morally serious blockbuster, theologically thoughtful, and realistically inspirational film series yet made.