The Master

 Year:  2012

Director:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Screenplay:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring:  Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams

Running Time:  137 minutes

Genre:  Drama

Freddie Quell (Phoenix), a troubled, heavy drinking World War Two veteran, finds it difficult to adjust to postwar American society.  His drinking, coupled with his violent, erratic behaviour, causes him to be fired from several jobs, as he drifts across the States.  In San Francisco, Freddie meets Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) the founder and leader of a movement known as "The Cause", which claims to help people using a confrontational technique called "Processing".  Freddie becomes fascinated by The Cause and the charismatic Dodd, and soon becomes a devoted follower.

This complex and often bleak drama, inspired by the early years of Scientology, is a powerful and sometimes disturbing piece of work.  Joaquin Phoenix gives one of his best performances as the violent alcoholic Freddie Quell.  The lecherous, mercurial Quell is often a deeply unlikeable character, but Phoenix gives us a glimpse of the humanity at his core.  Philip Seymour Hoffman is perfectly cast the charming, garrulous Dodd.  With Hoffman you can see how someone might fall for Dodd's line.  Dodd and Quell form a kind of father-son relationship, with Dodd frequently talking to him as if he's a small child, despite the fact that Hoffman was only seven years older than Phoenix.  There are moments, however, when Dodd's genial facade slips in brief explosions of rage.  Amy Adams plays Dodd's wife, Peggy, a quiet woman, who is a true believer in Dodd and The Cause, who is a mixture of charm, calm rage and steely determination.  There are also appearances from Laura Dean, Jesse Plemons and Rami Malek.  The film is far more than just a drama about a cult, it deals with America in the late 1940s early 1950s, the need to belong and the deep human will to believe in something.   Most of all it's about the strange connection between two men who are polar opposites and yet have a strange attachment.  Even when Freddie's bad behaviour alienates almost everyone around him, Dodd still insists in bringing him back into the fold.  The film's principal weakness is that it is quite meandering, it's one of those films where the story seems to have reached a conclusion, but there is still more to come.  However, this is a small criticism, since this is a truly great film.

Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rami Malek in The Master
  

Little Women

Year of Release:  2019
Director:  Greta Gerwig
Screenplay:  Greta Gerwig, based on the novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Starring:  Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet
Running Time:  135 minutes
Genre:  Period drama

Set in the 1860s the film follows the four March sisters:  Responsible Meg (Watson) the oldest of the four; stubborn and fiery Jo (Ronan), an aspiring writer; kind, shy and musical Beth (Scanlen) and the youngest of the four, Amy (Pugh), an aspiring painter. 

This is one of several adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel, which I have never read, and I have never seen any of the other adaptations of it, and so I cannot say how faithful or not this film is to it's source.  The film introduces us to the March sisters as adults, and moves back and forth between their childhood and their adult lives.  The film is beautifully made with some ravishing images, and impeccably played by a very strong cast.  After having made a splash with her directorial debut Lady Bird, this marks Greta Gerwig as one of the most promising new directors working today.  The film has a large cast of characters and moves between a number of different storylines and time frames, with nary a misstep.  It also successfully balances period detail with a contemporary relevance.

Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women

Twin Peaks (2017 series)

Year of Release: 2017
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch and Mark Frost
Starring:  Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Michael Horse, Chrysta Bell, Miguel Ferrer, David Lynch, Naomi Watts, Robert Forster, Harry Goaz, Kimmy Robertson, Harry Dean Stanton, Laura Dern
Running Time:  18 one hour episodes
Genre:  Horror, crime, mystery

The original series Twin Peaks, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, ran for two seasons between 1989 and 1991 and centered on eccentric FBI agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) investigating the murder of teenager Laura Palmer (Lee) in the picturesque small town of Twin Peaks.  The show mixed murder mystery, small town soap opera, cozy comedy and surreal fantasy.  Despite only lasting for two seasons, before being cancelled due to declining ratings, the show was hugely influential and is probably one of the biggest cult TV shows of all time.  The series was followed by a movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which despite being released to largely negative reviews and poor box office back in 1992 has come to be regarded as a major work.  For years Twin Peaks appeared to be pretty much dead in the water, though, with David Lynch going back and forth over whether there would be a return to the strange, small town.  Until a new eighteen part Twin Peaks series was broadcast on Showtime in 2017, every episode written by Lynch and Frost and directed by Lynch.  It could have been that the new Twin Peaks would be yet another exercise in the recent nostalgia boom. 

In fact, it was anything but.  If the original Twin Peaks broke the rules of traditional TV, this pretty much explodes the whole concept of traditional narrative television.  David Lynch has described it as an eighteen hour movie and it kind of is.  Most of the episodes end with a musical performance in a bar, otherwise the episodes just stop usually with no cliffhanger or real conclusion.  There is no real plot either, it's a collection of plot strands, which are picked up and dropped seemingly with no rhyme or reason, but most involve the reappearance of Dale Cooper after 25 years stuck in the bizarre netherworld known as the Black Lodge.  Or is it?  Is it Cooper's demonically possessed doppelganger?  Or is it Las Vegas accountant Dougie Jones (Maclachlan again)?  Or all three? Where as the original Twin Peaks was essentially a murder-mystery/soap-opera with surreal fantasy overtones, in this one the weirdness is central throughout the entire show.  Even scenes that seem to be relatively straightforward are filmed and performed in a strangely off-beat way.  It also opens the story up, taking place not only in Twin Peaks, but in New York, South Dakota, Las Vegas, Texas, and even New Mexico in the 1950s.  Frequently serving up some of the most bizarre and, at times, deeply disturbing images and sequences you are ever likely to see on your TV screen, this won't appeal to everyone.  I would recommend watching Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk With Me first, if you liked that then you will probably like this.  The series as a whole is David Lynch's masterpiece: a fascinating, maddening, funny, disturbing, scary, frustrating, mesmerising puzzle box that lingers in the mind, and makes me for one keen to watch it again to work out the clues that I have missed.

 

It only gets stranger: MIKE (Al Strobel) and Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in Twin Peaks

Blue Velvet

Year:  1986
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch
Starring:  Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Hope Lange, George Dickerson, Dean Stockwell
Running Time:  120 minutes
Genre:  Mystery, thriller, crime

This was the film with which David Lynch finally found his niche after the bizarre Eraserhead (1977), the striking success of The Elephant Man (1980) and the disasterous critical and commercial flop that was Dune (1984).

College student Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan) returns to his home town of Lumberton after his father collapses in the back garden.  Taking  a walk trhough a patch of waste ground near his house, Jeffrey discovers a mouldering, ant infested human ear on the ground which he takes to the police.  The detective's daughter, Sandy (Dern), reveals to Jeffrey that the ear may be connected with an ongoing case involving a singer, Dorothy Vallens (Rossellini).  Hiding in Dorothy's apartment, Jeffrey soon discovers that she is being brutally tormented by the violent and deranged Frank Booth (Hopper).  Before long Jeffrey is drawn into their nightmarish underworld of sadomasochistic sex and violence.

This film opens with the credits, elegantly written in copperplate writing, over undulating blue velvet curtains.  We then see a succession of stylised images of a perfect all-American small town while Bobby Vinton sings the song "Blue Velvet" on the soundtrack, then the camera moves deeper into the neatly manicured lawn to reveal a seething netherworld of insects tearing each other apart.  This sequence encapsulates the principal theme of the film, that just below the perfect facade of small-town life, lurk violent undercurrents. 

Jeffrey Beaumont, the clean-cut all-American boy, has to choose between the nice, normal surface world, represented by wholesome, squeaky-clean Sandy, and the dark, violent, sexual underworld, represented by sultry, tormented Dorothy.  Jeffrey has a pretty big dark side right from the start ("Are you a detective or a pervert?" Sandy asks him fairly early on.  "That's for you to find out," he replies), however for the most part he prefers to watch from a closet until he is drawn in against his will. 

The film's most memorable character is Dennis Hopper's completely unhinged Frank, sucking in some unidentified gas through a mask, bellowing obscenities and threats, he manages to be both horrific and hilarious often at the same time.  Reportedly, Hopper rang up David Lynch, who he had never met, exclaiming "I have to play Frank!  I am Frank!"  Which apparently quite frightened Lynch.  Isabella Rossellini gives a powerful performance as the seductive and troubled singer.  After the film she and Lynch dated for a while.

Resonances from the film recur throught Lynch's subsequent work, most notably in the television series Twin Peaks (1989-1991) and the resulting film Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk With Me (1992) which also deal with the dark underbelly of American small town life.   

Blue Velvet is a funny, dark, horrifying, erotic and deeply powerful film.  It is one of the most impressive American films of the 1980s and is the quintessential David Lynch movie.

"It's a strange world."
- It certainly is for Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan)

Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) sings the blues in Blue Velvet

Wild at Heart

Year:  1990
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch, based on the novel Wild at Heart:  The Story of Sailor and Lula by Barry Gifford
Starring:  Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Willem Dafoe, Harry Dean Stanton, J.E. Freeman, Isabella Rossellini
Running Time:  120 minutes
Genre:  Road movie, drama, comedy, romance

This startling film plays like a surreal homage to The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Elvis Presley.  Sailor Ripley (Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Dern) are a young couple deeply in love.  However Lula's deranged mother, Marietta (Ladd), is determined to keep them apart.  After Sailor is released following a prison sentence for killing a man in self-defense, he and Lula decide to run off to California.  However, Marietta is determined to get Lula back and sends her private detective boyfriend, Johnnie Farrgut (Stanton), to track the couple down.  To make sure that Sailor is kept away permanently, Marietta contacts her other boyfriend, the murderous gangster Marcello Santos (Freeman), to send a hitman after the couple.  Meanwhile, Sailor and Lula find themselves trapped in a dangerous and very strange world, as they travel through a twisted, nightmarish version of the southern US.

The film opens with a match striking and then billowing clouds of flame filling the screen, and it doesn't let up from there.  There is never a dull moment in this hilarious, romantic, shockingly violent and deeply weird movie.  One of director David Lynch's trademarks is his mixing of extreme violence, disturbing surrealism, with often genuinely touching sentiment.  Lynch described this film as being "about finding love in Hell".  A long time fan of The Wizard of Oz, Lynch made the film one of the touchstones for the Wild at Heart script, and the film's sense of hope comes from Sailor and Lula's conviction that there is something better over the rainbow and at the end of the yellow brick road.  Lynch also saw Sailor as an Elvis Presley figure and Lula as Marilyn Monroe, and Nicolas Cage does perform two Elvis songs in the film.   Nicolas Cage turns in a superb perfomance as the snakeskin jacket clad Sailor (which in the film he claims "represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom"), and is perfectly complemented by Laura Dern as the tough and sexy Lula.  The love story between the two is genuinely affecting.  They make love, dance and have long rambling conversations about pretty much anything that happens to cross their minds.  Laura Dern's real-life mother Diane Ladd is memorable as the insane Marietta, for which she was Oscar nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

The film is very different from Barry Gifford's mostly dialogue driven novel.  Although the film is far more graphically violent than the book, the book is in it's own way darker, with quite a bleak conclusion.  Despite winning the Palme d'Or for Best Film at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, the movie was heavily criticised on it's release for the violence and weirdness, but in my opinion, the fact that this tender love story is set amongst all this horror, darkness and violence makes it shine all the more brighter.  Personally I love this film, it's sexy, romantic, violent, tender, funny and bizarre, and is probably David Lynch's most thoroughly entertaining movie.  The film's ultimate message appears to be that in an insane, twisted, nightmare world, the only hope for survival is love.


"This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top."
- It's hard to disagree with Lula (Laura Dern)

Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage hit the road in Wild at Heart