BEFORE: I'm finally making progress on the watchlist again, now that I've dealt with the influx of movies I received when the cable company added the EPIX channels. That was a rich vein of material, but now I'm back to adding a film to the list every other day, instead of every day. The list has already gone from 200 films down to 197 in the past week, and I was stuck at 200 for at least a month. Hey, progress is progress.
Linking from "Martha Marcy May Marlene", Elizabeth Olsen was also in a film called "Oldboy" with Rami Malek, who appears in tonight's film. Other linkings were possible, but that one's the most elegant.
THE PLOT: A Naval veteran arrives home from war unsettled and uncertain of his future - until he is tantalized by The Cause and its charismatic leader.
AFTER: All in all, this seems like a "better" film than last night's film about cults - in that it's put together much more sensibly, all of the scenes are in the proper order, and so on. But the topic is still a tough one to get a handle on, and I'm not sure why that is. It almost feels like the director is sort of dancing around the subject matter, and not addressing the specifics of something, aka Scientology. They fall just short of naming the Master "L. Schmon Schmubbard" or doing anything like that, and whether that's done out of fear or shrewd marketing, who can say?
I didn't really understand the specifics of the cult, if it was a cult, rather than just a loose group of people who believe a bunch of wacky stuff. The whole sequence where the lead character was made to walk from the window to the wall, and back again, and again, and again - I just didn't understand the point of the exercise, what was he supposed to learn from this, was this just a ritual or some kind of test, and if so, what exactly was being tested? His ability to follow directions? Was this just to break him down with the repetition of a task, to determine how many times he would follow orders? Was this to determine his breaking point? TELL ME WHAT WAS GOING ON!
I've had to do a fair amount of work here to determine the "why" of certain scenes, because the film itself ended up being so damned oblique about everything. Perhaps when you deal with such odd topics as subtle mind control, behavior modification, question and answer sessions (called "processing"), it's hard to get a handle on anything close to cause and effect. Perhaps it's just the contrast between the two lead characters - one is crude, wild and untamed, and the other is well-read, refined and in control, but he's also a complete fraud.
There's an obvious contrast between the two, which doesn't really explain why they are drawn to each other, or perhaps fascinated by each other. The title seems to suggest that one is the dominant master and the other is more subservient - which all seems to fit, but still it seems like they have very little in common except for their love of homemade alcoholic concoctions.
A couple of plot problems seem to result from the possibility that what we are seeing on the screen is not actually taking place, except for in the mind of one character, and this is confusing to say the least. More could have been done to make a distinction between a real event taking place, and an imagined one, otherwise as an audience member I'm inclined to believe that everything I'm seeing is equally real.
Also confusing was The Master's constant asking of the lead character "How did we first meet?" Umm, it happened just a few scenes ago, did he forget? Did too much alcohol drive this fact from his mind? Ah, wait, I get it, he was talking about when they first met in a previous life - this was pretty hard to get a grasp on for a while.
That's another thing, I don't really get the whole "past lives" thing either - it's just another way of looking at the world that keeps us from realizing that we're mortal, right? Motivated by the fear of death, if we believe that we'll go from body to body over the course of history, then dying's not so bad, it's just like moving to a new house. I don't really have a problem with people "remembering" their past lives, because this film not only shows that happening, but also offers up a possible explanation for it. (I wonder, do people undergoing past-life regressions ever end up fighting over which one of them was really Napoleon?)
My problem is that there's not one lick of scientific evidence that suggests this is even possible, and involves nothing more than putting someone in a dream-state or something similar to hypnosis. True, there is the law of conservation that states that energy cannot be destroyed, but who says that a soul counts as energy? And where does it GO when it's in-between bodies? And if this is the process, then who's in charge of determining where I go next, and how do I get there? It's an interesting idea, but it's still junk science and even worse math. There are probably more people alive now than there ever were in ancient history, so where did all the extra souls come from?
And despite one's best intentions, you can't just say the universe works a particular way, and then expect it to cooperate with your wishful thinking. I might as just well say that when the universe finishes expanding, and reaches maximum volume, that it will start contracting, and time will start to run backwards, and everything that has happened will happen again in reverse (but we won't notice because our perceptions will be going backwards too) and people will all rise up from their graves and live life again in reverse, and end up as small babies climbing back into their mothers' wombs.
Hey, I just invented a new religion!
Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "8MM"), Philip Seymour Hoffman (last seen in "Cold Mountain"), Amy Adams (last seen in "Trouble With the Curve"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Wild at Heart"), Jesse Plemons, Jillian Bell.
RATING: 4 out of 10 manuscripts
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