Malick and Anderson, masters both

As in last year's Toronto Fest, which showcased the talent of Michael Fassbender, edition 2012 also features standout performances by male actors. Playing a beleaguered Iowan farmer, Dennis Quaid delivers what many are calling the performance of a lifetime in
Rahmin Bahrani's At Any Price.  As Quaid's son, Zac Efron,
distancing himself from his teen idol image, makes his own mark in a meaty indie role. Mads Mikkelsen and his cheekbones lay on the charisma in the Danish A Royal Affair by Nikolaj Arcel. 

Standing in a league all their own, though, at this year's TIFF are Philip Seymour Hoffman
and Joaquin Phoenix in The Master by Paul Thomas Anderson. Many critics at the fest are divided on the merits of this film, inspired by L. Ron Hubbard and the swathe cut through American culture by Scientology. But few would not applaud the barn-burning turns from the two male leads. At moments,  watching these hugely interesting thesps play off each other is pure joy.

The film opens with a blast of jagged dissonance (familiar from the score of Anderson's previous There Will be Blood) composed by musical wizard Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame. Meet Freddie Quell (Phoenix), newly liberated from the U.S. Navy post WWII, a mass of dissonance in and of himself, a man with sexual issues, an explosive temper, and a talent for concocting moonshine from paint stripper. This walking time bomb loosed on America is adopted almost as a mascot by Hoffman's character Lancaster Dodd, founder of a movement that uses time-travel hypnosis to enable people to take control of their lives; his system can even, so he claims, cure cancer and bring world peace.

The Master traces the trajectory of the bond between master and acolyte, from analytic sessions that Dodd calls "processing" to Quell's rise as Dodd's right-hand man as his empire expands with the publication of his new opus The Split Saber. Also on hand --and perhaps secretly pulling the strings --is Dodd's wife (Amy Adams, putting new perk in perkiness). Into the dance between the two men, Anderson fluidly weaves the backstory of Quell's thwarted love for a 16-year-old girl from his hometown.

The filmmaking, buttressed by Greenwood's score, is stunning from the start, when seaman Quell makes love on the beach to a lady he's built from sand. As Lancaster, Hoffman rocks the screen with the bravado and self-assurance of a power-mad man who--so his his son claims--is "making it up as he goes along." And Phoenix, his whole body twisted and warped as his mind, is almost painfully mesmerizing.

More problematic is the film itself, which doesn't resolve the story so much as cut it loose at the end. Worse, you get the suspicion midpoint that you're witnessing a lot of sound and fury over, well, very little. There's no there there. No back-vision on the part of Anderson regarding what his story is really about. Some deep intelligence from the filmmaker has gone missing.

Also dividing the critics at this year's festival is Terrence Malick's To the Wonder. While few would
deny its surpassing visual beauty, some are put
off by the film's vaunting religiosity, paucity of story, virtual
absence of dialogue. Over dinner last night, one critic friend called it
"self-parody."

Me, I find Wonder a thing of wonder. The ravishing images
married to a glorious score- think Wagner's Parsifal--keep you in a
suspended swoon. And the film manages the paradoxical feat of naked
intimacy, as if you were lolling about in Malick's pysche, while
revealing scant details about the notoriously private filmmaker.

Such story as there is basically involves a memory/meditation about a
man (Ben Affleck) who falls in love with a Parisian (Olga Kurylenko)
and brings her back to the States to his home somewhere in Malick-land--i.e. windswept plains always viewed at dusk or early dawn, dotted
with sterile suburban houses and peopled with folks wandering about in a
trance. The man reconnects with a childhood friend (gorgeous Rachel
McAdams), his transplanted wife starts an affair, the marriage unravels.
Throughout, a priest (Javier Bardem) who has lost his calling weaves
his own prayerful musings among Kurylenko's voiceovers. The closing
images offer little closure, only fodder for speculation.

The film opens with Kurylenko's murmured French for "I'd never hoped to
love like this again," set against the couple wandering the vast flats
of a literal world wonder, the monastery Mont St. Michel in Brittany.
Shot in midwinter and of course at some mystical violet hour, the place
resembles Malick's depiction of heaven at the end of The Tree of Life.
It's as if this astonishing filmmaker had a direct pipeline to divinity
and feels as comfy in apocalyptic milieu as in someone's living room
(a trait that maddens some viewers). "I want only to go a little of our
way together," Kurylenko says. And, "If you love me, I need nothing
else."

In Wonder, Malick unabashedly sets the limits of time-bound
human love against God's eternal love, a theme underscored by Bardem's
longing to reconnect with his faith. Not unlike Malick, the priest is
also dialoguing with God: "How long will you hide Yourself?"

Granted, maybe Affleck and especially Kurylenko go overboard with the
frolicking and gamboling in Malick's idiosyncratic take on lovers. But
you don't need religion to savor this hymn about profane and sacred love--and about light, maybe the film's central subject. The wind-bending
grasses, a woman's hair, sun through trees, bison--even a humble
insect on a windowpane--are all conveyed by Malick's genius
cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki as spirit made manifest. (Intriguing
factoid: Lubezki is Jewish.) Malick offers a unique way of seeing the
world, a world filtered through the lens of a cinematic visionary.