The Master

Since the fall of 2012 I’ve heard people talk so excited about The Master.  From various critics, bloggers and other film enthusiasts I heard praises of the acting, the directing, the story, the style, everything.  Naturally, my expectations were very high.

In The Master, Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, a wandering Navy veteran.  He seems to have no aptitude or talents other than women, boozing and making liquor out of household chemicals.  His brew is potent, dangerous and causes him to run from one job to the next.  That is, until he becomes a stowaway on a yacht with most unusual passengers.

After his presence is discovered on the ship, he is brought before the group’s leader,  Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman).  Rather than punish Freddie, Dodd takes special interest in him, Dodd seems intrigued and inspired by him.  After an intense scene where Dodd grills Freddie with questions, some very personal, we learn that he is the leader of a movement simply called The Cause.

Most of the details about The Cause are left very vague other than they believe in past lives and reaching back in your mind to them to help find inner peace.  It looks like a cult, sounds like a cult, moves like a cult and Dodd is the perfect embodiment of the charismatic cult leader.  And Freddie is a simple enough man to stay with Dodd after the ship has reached shore.

For a while, it’s hard to tell if Freddie is believing in The Cause or just doesn’t have anything better to do.  He follows whatever Dodd and his wife, Peggy (Amy Adams) say like an overgrown child.  In his own manner, Freddie defends them in front of those who question The Cause, passes out flyers on the street, even goes to jail with Dodd.  Later in the film, it seems Dodd and his followers try to brainwash Freddie.  It’s a long and slow process that can wear on the viewer much like it does Freddie.

Scenes between Hoffman and Phoenix are intense and powerful in many different ways, many different times throughout the film.  It’s obvious Dodd is a more intelligent and sophisticated man, using those skills to charm Freddie and keep him at his side.  Nearly the opposite, Freddie is destructive, wild and unpredictable like an animal.  While these opposites create natural friction, it’s amazing how well they fit together as well.  My favorite scenes were Freddie’s first interview where he is told not to blink and the jail cell scene, a perfectly constructed long, still shot.

What bothers me about this film is that this Cause, cult, movement, whatever is the central idea, yet nearly everything about it is hardly addressed.  What does one gain when joining?  What does it take to join?  Does Dodd believe he’s a genuine prophet or looking to make money?  This film feels like it has so much it meant to say, but got so focused on the characters, it forgot to get the words out, or even point us in the right direction.

The Master is a quietly intense and captivating film with great actors doing great acting.  It’s pretty great.  However, I felt that I had the bar set to high and was a little disappointed that I was not completely blown away.  It’s the sort of story that feels right to come from Paul Thomas Anderson, who also directed There Will Be Blood.  The Master is coldly captivating and beautifully filmed, yet it leaves me trying to connect dots and make sense of things that are left way too vague.

“What a day.  We fought against the day and we won.  We won.”

Moneyball

I don’t get very excited about baseball, unless I’m in the stands and a foul ball is heading my way.  And statistics confuse me, even if you put them in an animated graph with bright colors.  So while Moneyball held a lot of baseball talk and ideas on choosing affordable players solely by their statistics, my attention was turned to the human elements of  Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the plot and tension created by the idea of approaching building a baseball team from a different angle.  While the Yankees seem to have unlimited money to spend on the most sought after players, the Oakland A’s have a much, much smaller budget.  The playing field created by money is not at all fair, but it seems that only Billy understands that the A’s must adapt to survive.  Then he finds Peter Brand, working with the Cleveland Indians.  What he sees is in baseball is breaking down all baseball players into detailed statistics and builds a team that is able to make the most runs.  Keeping that goal in mind, Billy hires Peter to help build a worthy and affordable team for the A’s.

Of course, there is opposition to the idea of building a baseball team straight off the numbers.  The experienced scouts, depicted as old men eating donuts, cannot wrap their heads around finding new talent this way.  They get hung up on oddities and personality defects that sometimes have nothing to do with playing ability; age, behavior, how attractive their girlfriends are.  Even once the team is assembled, Billy and Peter have to fight with the hardheaded coach, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to get him to play the players as they were designed.

While on the surface, Brad Pitt’s Oscar nominated performance makes Billy seem mostly concerned with baseball, he has an intriguing personal life and back story.  We get flashbacks to him being recruited into professional baseball straight out of high school and having to choose between that and his scholarship to Stanford.  It is clear that he did not understand all the opportunities he gave up for a baseball career, that sadly did not pan out.  Now, as a struggling manager, we see him deal with a lot of frustration in physical ways, from working out, to driving his truck like a maniac in an empty parking lot.  On top of all that, he is divorced and struggles to make time to visit his twelve year old daughter.  I think she lovingly describes Billy best in her song, “You’re such a loser, dad.  Just enjoy the show.”

I was happily surprised with Jonah Hill’s Oscar nominated portrayal of Peter.  With an economics degree from Yale, and looking like the kid picked last on the playground, Peter feels like an unlikely person to find his first job in professional baseball. I imagined him more likely to have a fantasy baseball team, or a Dungeons and Dragons guild, but I loved how one of his favorite players was one of the most undervalued players, nicknamed The Waddler.  Thing is, Peter is so quiet, shy and insecure through most of the film that we never learn much about him outside of the job, and that’s okay, he’s only a supporting character.  Hill and Pitt work well off together to lift each other’s character up.  Hill depicts Peter perfectly, from all his mild, thoughtfully quiet moments to achievements that slowly build up his confidence.  And that is such a refreshing change of pace from his usual foul mouthed comedies.  I hope to see him in more serious roles.

Along with the two acting nominations, Moneyball earned six total Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Film Editing, Sound Mixing and Adapted Screenplay.

While Moneyball is a movie centered around sports and sports talk, and it helps to enjoy and understand baseball, it does not cater only to sports fans.  It is a kind of underdog story that values brains over brawn, and money.  We understand how much is at stake with this new way of thinking and we can’t help but hope that it works out.  Surprisingly, the film does not cop out into the typical big win ending, but that does not mean the experiment has failed.  The focus is on the people behind the players, their struggles and how they changed how the game is played.

“Baseball thinking is medieval.  They are asking all the wrong questions.  And if I say it to anybody, I’m-I’m ostracized.  I’m-I’m-I’m a leper.”

If the Academy wants to award a thoughtful, unconventional underdog movie, Moneyball will win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Capote

The film greets you with eerie Kansas fields.  The colors are cold, faded and dead, a winter with no snow for enchantment.  Everything is vacant, barren, and uninviting.  The tone is set and doesn’t give us much to hope for.

In this middle of nowhere Kansas town, a family of four is murdered.  This kind of senseless violence is uncommon and shakes the small town.  When Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a writer for the New Yorker hears about it, he’s intrigued and travels there with his partner, Harper Lee (Catherine Keener).  They investigate to see how the murders have impacted the people, but it isn’t long before Capote digs deeper and decides to turn the small project into his greatest literary work, In Cold Blood.

Capote, played by the amazing Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a pasty white, slick haired, portly man.  He sports a slightly bored and conniving expression behind his thick glasses.  It seems he has to prove he’s better than everyone around him in some way, whether he’s showing off his scarf or paid the luggage guy compliment him.  It always has to be about him.  He’s always finding opportunities to just toot his own horn.  But more importantly, he’s able to slightly manipulate people with a little story.

When you put a guy like that in a little town in the sticks, he’s not going to make many friends.  Some people are interested by him, but only for a while.  The only one who really wants his company is one of the murders, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.).  In Capote’s research he interviews Smith, but becomes more and more fascinated by him.

Things get dangerous when Capote sympathizes with Smith.  Where do the morals lie on befriending and helping a convicted murderer on death row?  On one hand, Capote says he wants people to understand Smith as a man, not as a monster, yet the sensational story doesn’t make him the most sympathetic character.

From the first day Capote was in Kansas, when he walked into the funeral home, saw four caskets lined up and had the gull to lift the lid and peer in, I knew he was in trouble.  His morbid fascination plus his head jammed up his ass was going to be a horrible combination for him, and to be honest, I wanted to see him fall.  I won’t give away any details, cause those are worth the watch, but Capote gets the mental anguish he deserves but is hailed for his amazing work.

“It’s the book I was always meant to write.”