Anderson and Phoenix.

I never cease to be amused by the pile of unmitigated crap that gets shoveled off onto the moviegoing public by pretentious critics. They’re at it again with The Master, a load of film-festival tripe that was booed in Venice and greeted with massive walkouts in Toronto but is now being defended in an organized rescue mission that hopes to develop a minor cult following in New York before the whole thing mercifully vanishes in a puff of twaddle. With an embarrassing, overwrought performance by the dependably creeped-out Joaquin Phoenix that has to be the most hysterically misguided overacting since Dennis Hopper played Napoleon and Harpo Marx played Sir Isaac Newton in The Story of Mankind, I’m tempted to call it the worst thing I have seen this year, but there are two more coming up—Terrence Malick’s dystopic To the Wonder and a diabolically demented time-travel farce called Cloud Atlas—that are even worse. I will also refrain from labeling The Master “the worst movie I’ve ever seen!” because like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, I’ve blurted that cry of despair so many times, who would believe me?It might not even be the worst movie ever made, depending on how you feel about such hollow, juvenile and superficial trash as I  ♥ Huckabees, Brewster McCloud, Punch-Drunk Love, Mulholland Drive, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost Highway, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and ... well, as they said in Hollywood during the McCarthy witch hunts, “the list goes on.” 

With so many amateurs who run what’s left of the once-great movie industry making bad movies that pander to an easy-to-satisfy youth market that doesn’t care what it’s watching as long as the projectors keep running, and with so many bogus producers who used to be parking lot attendants at the Brown Derby always miraculously raising the money to make more, one thing is certain: no matter how rotten the movie is that you just suffered through, there’s always another one on its way that is 10 times worse. Paul Thomas Anderson, the egomaniacal writer-director of The Master, is a member of the new group of anarchists that includes Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, freaky Todd Solondz and the dismally overrated, no-talent Charlie Kaufman, who wins critical praise for writing incoherent movies about why he can’t write coherent movies. Abominations like the neo-Kafka burlesque Synedoche, New York are algebraic extensions of all of them put together—eccentric but brainless. And now The Master, which follows in a perfect line—all style and no content—and therefore offers no fresh equation of its own.

Since it doesn’t make one bit of sense—and probably isn’t supposed to—there’s not much to say about it except ... why? It begins with Joaquin Phoenix masturbating and goes steadily downhill from there. With agonized silences interrupted by operatic rages, he plays a lost, unfocused sailor stationed in the Pacific during World War II named Freddie Quell, who creates the image of a woman out of sand on a beach and humps it unmercifully. Subject to black depressions, unprovoked violence and crying jags, he’s an obvious mental case. He’s also such a hopeless alcoholic that he even drinks airplane gasoline and cleaning fluid. After the war, Freddie somehow manages to talk his way out of a veterans hospital where he is being observed and studied by a band of bewildered Navy psychiatrists, and wafts from scene to scene—itinerant farm worker, department store photographer and drunken stowaway on a yacht from San Francisco to New York, where his gullibility lands him in the clutches of another nutcase, writer-philosopher-scientist Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who has invented a new cult religion called “The Cause.” Early hype promised an exposé of Scientology, with Hoffman as a thinly veiled L. Ron Hubbard, but as it turns out, The Master has nothing to do with either—or much of anything else.

Anyway, these two wackos hit it off on contact, mainly because Freddie is a tortured soul desperately looking for a surrogate father to lead him into the light, and Dodd is a cryptic phony and ersatz Ayn Rand clone who loves his new convert’s cocktails of peach juice mixed with paint thinner. Between nonsensical interrogations called “The Process” (“Are you one of the Hidden Rulers, or a Communist?”), they sometimes drink Lysol. What little there is of a plot: a religious manipulator who rules his flock by perfecting the art of brainwashing (they think he can trace their previous lives through hypnosis) and claims he can cure cancer finally meets up with a perfect candidate for mind control, who proves unsalvageable. The result is a love affair consummated in the pulpit of Hell. The acolytes include Amy Adams as Hoffman’s pregnant wife, Jesse Plemons as his son, Ambyr Childers and Rami Malek as his daughter and her new husband, and Laura Dern, a Philadelphia heiress who contributes to The Cause if not the film in what amounts to little more than a walk-on. It is rare to see a union of such accomplished folks so desperate to form some kind of emotional connection with material that is essentially unplayable in a film fueled by chaos. Farcical dream sequences fill in the gaps where a narrative should be, like a party where all the female converts cavort full-frontally naked while the men sip champagne and ogle them in a drooling frenzy—a scene stolen, I might add, right out of Stanley Kubrick’s dreadful 1999 Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman fiasco Eyes Wide Shut. As the movie drags on interminably, Freddie becomes his master’s henchman, defending him against all skeptics and detractors, violently attacking the police who come to arrest Dodd for extortion. Freddie is too stupid to think for himself, even after Dodd’s own son Val tells him that his father just makes up the rules of the cult as he goes along. Freddie abandons The Cause to find his own salvation, tracks down his wartime sweetheart and finds her married, then goes on a binge that makes The Lost Weekend look like a Disney cartoon. It all ends up in England, where Dodd the Zealot has relocated his operations to avoid arrest and taxes. One last stab at rehabilitating Freddie fails, and the movie just peters away to zero.

There’s a lot of excessive acting going on here, but none of it comes to anything. Since no character is ever properly developed, the cast is left to create stick figures out of some kind of neurotic haze. As much as I admire the charismatic Philip Seymour Hoffman, he’s just shadowboxing here. As a toxic messiah who charms, cheats and seduces his subjects, he huffs and puffs and tries to blow the house down, but the superficial dialogue does him in. Even accomplished actors need guidance, and director Anderson fails to display the remotest knowledge of tempo or pacing. Hoffman’s “Processing Session,” during which he forces Freddie to repeat his actions again and again, goes on for a good 20 minutes. As for Joaquin Phoenix, his idea of conveying brain damage is to walk around with a bone protruding from his shoulder blade, hunched over in a loping position, like a pretzel-shaped orangutan. Is he auditioning for The Elephant Man?Grotesquely mannered for no reason, his facial expressions range from gross distortions to blank novocained stares. They call this acting, but it’s acting from the Sacha Baron Cohen School of Dramatic Art. No director who knows anything about real acting would allow this much self-indulgence to plod on ad infinitum. I’ve got news for Mr. Phoenix, Mr. Anderson and company: on-screen schizophrenia wears out its welcome real fast.There is no dramatic arc in The Master, just 137 minutes of truncated images that provoke but do not add up to a satisfying whole. Plus, the visuals are a deadly bore. Despite the undeserved praise some critics have lavished on the director for filming the whole thing in 65-millimeter, the expensive process is wasted on an endless parade of debilitating and annoying close-ups. 137 minutes of Joaquin Phoenix’s nose hairs is not my idea of appetizing.

Call The Master whatever you want, but lobotomized catatonia from what I call the New Hacks can never take the place of well-made narrative films about real people that tell profound stories for a broader and more sophisticated audience. Fads come and go, but as Walter Kerr used to say, “I’ll yell tripe whenever tripe is served.”

rreed@observer.com

THE MASTER

Running Time 137 minutes

Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams

1/4

The book, which is scheduled to be released later this month, alleges that Katie Holmes was impregnated, a la Rosemary's Baby, with the preserved semen of deceased Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. It also says that Mr. Cruise’s ex-wife, Nicole Kidman, “feared blackmail” over auditing tapes she made with Scientologists in which she discusses her sex life. Moreover, Mr. Morton writes that Mr. Cruise is the second most powerful person in the church’s hierarchy; and, according to the book, he now plans to recruit soccer phenom David Beckham to the religion.

Additionally, Mr. Morton apparently spends some time focusing on Mr. Cruises close relationship with Scientology leader David Miscavige. Among other things, the author claims that Mr. Miscavige planted a field of wild flowers at the church’s base in California after Mr. Cruise told him that his fantasy was to run through a field of flowers after marrying Ms. Kidman. Perhaps even stranger, Mr. Morton writes that Mr. Miscavige joined Mr. Cruise and Ms. Holmes on their honeymoon to the Maldives.

The Church of Scientology is apparently considering filing a $100 million lawsuit after the book goes on sale.

Diana author names Tom Cruise as 'World Number Two in Scientology' [Daily Mail]

Margarita is a proudly out lesbian, but Scientology has a rather, well, complicated relationship with homosexuality, detailed in this Wikipedia entry. The bottom line is that they appear to see it as a curable condition, though the group seems to be getting more pro-gay.

The church's late founder, L. Ron Hubbard, had this to say:

"The sexual pervert (and by this term Dianetics, to be brief, includes any and all forms of deviation in dynamic two such as homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc., and all down the catalog of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing) is actually quite ill physically."

ing on."

Ever mindful of bad publicity, the United Nations promptly planted shrubs to obscure the elephant's offending appendage. But the puzzle of why the Friends of L. Ron Hubbard, a private group that operates out of the New York offices of the Church of Scientology at 349 West 48th Street, received such prominence in a United Nations event, may take more than a few well-placed bushes to solve.

At a time when the Church of Scientology, which the U.S. Government recognized as a tax-exempt religious organization in 1993, is fighting for recognition and respect around the world, it is no surprise that the Friends of L. Ron Hubbard would want to be associated with the United Nations. As to how Hubbard's quote ended up on the program, the answer is simple if somewhat startling: The Friends of L. Ron Hubbard wrote and printed the program themselves, at a cost of around $4,000, according to Dennis Dubin, a partner at the Stoltz Brothers Ltd. property management company in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., who helped raise money for the elephant. Indeed, according to Hans Janitschek, chairman of the Cast the Sleeping Elephant Trust, the Friends contributed about $50,000 toward the more than $500,000 cost of the entire project. Other money came from Swissair, the Lama Gangchen Peace Foundation and Hans Baron von Ludwigstorff, an Austrian businessman. The United Nations has a policy of accepting gifts only from member nations-thus the three gift-giving countries, while they supplied resources to capture, sedate and mold the elephant, acted more as legitimizers of the gift rather than as financial backers. When contacted by The Observer , the U.N. representatives of Kenya, Namibia and Nepal declined to comment.

The involvement of the Friends of L. Ron Hubbard came as a surprise to officials at the United Nations, who did not see the program until the day of the ceremony.

"We did not even know about this link to the L. Ron Hubbard organization until we saw the program," said Fred Eckhard, spokesman for Secretary General Annan. "But even if we had known, it would not be for us to question the Governments' sources of financing." He added that, if there was anything controversial about a particular contribution, "the embarrassment should accrue to the Governments rather than to the U.N."

One who disagrees is Charles Lichenstein, who was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 1981 to 1984 and co-chair of the Congressionally mandated Commission on Improving the Effectiveness of the United Nations, and who is currently a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "That should not ever be permitted," he told The Observer , of the Friends being allowed to write and print the program. "Not in return for $4 million should anyone have control over substantive content. The U.N. should have taken responsibility. They shouldn't have let that happen … There is always someone who has to be looking at it hard enough to preclude an embarrassment. They should have someone vetting them, but nothing about the U.N. surprises me."

Mr. Lichenstein questioned the motives of the Friends. "They'll probably advertise the fact that among all their marvelous services to humanity, they're also giving precious gifts to the U.N., and it will appear in literature and pitches to top prospective members," he said.

Friendless in Nebraska

Who are the Friends of L. Ron Hubbard? "We've never been that official," said Bill Runyon, a Friends member who said he was "coordinator of individuals from the eastern United States." "Ron has had many friends throughout the years from many walks of life, and when there's a project, we contact those people interested in supporting the community and making it better." Among the Friends' endeavors is continuing Hubbard's tradition of setting up a 60-foot-tall Christmas tree adjacent to the Scientology building on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. The tree goes up every year and thousands of kids come to see it.

Sharyn Runyon, Mr. Runyon's wife and public relations director for the Friends, told The Observer that the elephant project was in keeping with the altruism of the Friends. "It's a very normal thing for us to be involved with," said Ms. Runyon, who said she chose the quote for the program and gave money toward the project. "We're dealing with safeguarding animals and taking responsibility for the environment and heightening awareness of that … Scientologists around the world have taken responsibility for the environment in various clean-up efforts. Everything from park clean-ups to beach clean-ups to environmental tree plantings and recycling programs."

But not everyone has welcomed the Friends. A few years ago, the Friends pledged $800,000 to build a park in Tilden, Neb., Hubbard's birthplace, but residents protested so loudly when they learned the park was to be named after Hubbard that the donation was withdrawn.

Ms. Runyon said the Friends were not identical with the Church of Scientology. "It's an organization made up of people who agree with L. Ron Hubbard's philosophy," she said, "of whatever religion. There are many members who are non-Scientologists and who support his goals and basically consider him a friend. It includes writers that knew him and military personnel that worked with him. I don't think that everyone is a Scientologist as far as I know." When asked to specify names of Friends, she mentioned author Kevin J. Anderson, who has written novels based on the X-Files television series and Star Wars films.

John Carmichael, president of New York's Church of Scientology, said the Friends of L. Ron Hubbard were distinct from his church. "Well, L. Ron Hubbard was the founder of the Church of Scientology, so he's got a lot of friends in the Church of Scientology, that's for sure," he said. "But it is a separate organization."

Nine More Elephants

The plan to cast a live sleeping elephant was hatched in 1976. Since 1989, the chairman of the Cast the Sleeping Elephant Trust, which raises funds for the project, has been Mr. Janitschek, a former senior adviser to three U.N. Secretary Generals, most recently Boutros-Boutros Ghali. Asked by The Observer if he had any qualms about accepting money from a controversial organization such as the Friends, Mr. Janitschek said, "You don't get anywhere without taking a risk. I took a risk with the penis and the donors, and the elephant will be there in 1,000 years … I followed my instincts … [I]f it were the Mafia, or a racist, fascist, communist, extremist, group, that would have caused problems at the U.N."

"There are other countries like Germany where Scientologists are viewed with suspicion," he said, "and are being subject to certain limitations and discrimination.… But if somebody here is a Scientologist, like Tom Cruise or John Travolta, it's not held against them."

Mr. Janitschek added that the United Nations never requested any information from him about fund-raising sources for the elephant, and that, as concerns the Friends, "The project would not have been completed without them."

But the United Nations did have some say: A senior U.N. official told The Observer that the donors had wanted to make "a huge event out of the unveiling with dancers, singers and celebrities," but the United Nations said No. "It was inappropriate," said the official. Which may be why Isaac Hayes, the R&B singer and Scientologist, did not make a speech, although he was listed on the program as a speaker.

The sculptor, Mihail, said he had no concerns about the Friends' involvement with his elephant. "I have no interest in who is Buddhist, Hindu, Catholics," he told The Observer .

It was in 1978 that Mihail met Mr. Janitschek, who was then special assistant for public information to Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. The two men agreed that the perfect location for the planned elephant would be at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan. There, they reasoned, the elephant could stand as a symbol for global wildlife preservation. Knowing that only member states are entitled to give gifts to the United Nations, Mr. Janitschek had to find one or several nations to receive the elephant from Mihail and then donate it to the United Nations. "We couldn't have presented it to the U.N. even if it was made of gold or diamonds," Mr. Janitschek said. Kenya, Namibia and Nepal accepted Mr. Janitschek's offer. "There were no rules or exceptions for how the money was to be raised," he said.

So Mr. Janitschek started raising money. But, last year, he found he was short and he called his acquaintance, Dennis Dubin. "One of my contacts, Hans Janitschek, had some problems raising money, so he called me," said Mr. Dubin. "He asked me to step in and see what I could do because I thought it was a valuable project. I got a whole bunch of people to put in $2,000 to $5,000."

Mr. Dubin brought in about $50,000, much of it from people affiliated with the Friends of L. Ron Hubbard. The Friends also put up $4,000 for the written materials. "They paid for the brochure," said Mr. Dubin. "They put up some money, $4,000, so they got to put their name on it."

A lawyer for the Cast the Sleeping Elephant Trust, Peter Oram, a New York taxation and litigation solo practitioner, said he was impressed with how quickly Mr. Dubin was able to raise money. "I know Dennis Dubin and we are pleased with Dennis Dubin," he said. "We love Dennis Dubin. Every check was sent in by overnight mail. There was a sense of urgency … And he wanted to have a program … Dennis sees this as a continuing thing, not to stop with the gift to the U.N. We have nine more elephants to sell, the molds are made, and we need more money, to permit us as a group to keep going, and we hope he will help. Dennis went a little further with some of his quotes [referring to the Hubbard statement on the brochure] … I understand that there is controversy about Scientology in Germany, but it is a recognized, legal organization in this country, and they're entitled to put their quotes on the program since they gave a lot of money."

Igor Novichenko, the senior protocol officer for the United Nations, said the program was a bit fancier than usual for U.N. gift ceremonies. "I would say that it was a little more elaborate," he said, "because this event was to have celebrities and music and a few other things that are not a standard feature of U.N. gift ceremonies. Usually, only permanent nations are involved and they know the U.N. way is more strict and more protocol-oriented."

Meanwhile, Mr. Janitschek has written a letter, on behalf of the "board of the Cast the Sleeping Elephant Trust," to Alvaro de Soto, Under Secretary General of the United Nations, asking that the shrubs be removed, since they represent "the virtual defilement of a work of art and in fact of nature itself-the antithesis of what was intended by the artist."