Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman does a beautiful job explaining what I touched on in my review of The Master a couple weeks back. Here’s OG:
I can’t escape the feeling that something has gone wrong in his work, and while there is now a cult for Paul Thomas Anderson, and a great many fans who just about think he’s God, the crucial problem, for me, is that one of the people who now thinks Paul Thomas Anderson is God is Paul Thomas Anderson. His films have acquired an Olympian sense of their own importance. …
Paul Thomas Anderson now wants to sever our connection with the people on screen, so that nothing gets in the way of our link to the magnetic pull of his directorial voice. It’s a warped vision of what a movie is. But when a director who, in Boogie Nights, made the humanity of his characters sing now insists on making movies as if he’s “the master,” and is hailed for it like he’s the indie-crossover answer to Orson Welles, maybe it’s not necessary for us to love his films. Maybe worship, in its way, feels better than love.
You should read Gleiberman’s whole piece; it’s quite good. I disagree with a fair portion of it—his take on There Will Be Blood, especially—but it’s a fascinating survey of the career of one of the few major filmmakers to emerge in the last 20 years. As I said, his take on The Master resonates with me because I largely agree with it. From my review:
What if, and bear with me here for a sec, but what if this is all just a big experiment by Paul Thomas Anderson? A sort of meta-commentary on the cult-like behavior The Master seeks to deconstruct? Testing how narratively abrasive and beautifully banal he can make his pictures before the cult of personality surrounding him reaches a breaking point?
Hard to say. I’ll let you know after I watch it again this weekend.
Watched it again I did. And I stand by every word I wrote: It’s a beautiful film that is fascinating to watch but extremely banal and massively overpraised. All of those qualities have to do with Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s a visual genius; he understands how to keep the audience’s attention; he thinks he has more to say than he does; and critics indulge him—nay, celebrate him—because they are in his thrall.
This is cult.
And, like Gleiberman, I am an apostate.
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I’m so disappointed that he made this instead of Inherent Vice. But then, that story has a plot, and apparently movies with plots can’t be artistic or something. But hey, if it was good enough for Pynchon, it’s good enough for me. Here’s to hoping he resumes working on that project. I’d love to see his take on that.