Great Character: Lancaster Dodd (“The Master”)
This month’s theme: Great Philip Seymour Hoffman characters. Today: Guest poster Jason Cuthbert looks at Lancaster Dodd from the 2012 movie The Master, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Hard Eight. Boogie Nights. Magnolia. Punch-Drunk Love. Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and director/screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson had four solid consecutive cinematic collaborations. The P.S.H. & P.T.A. Magic Show came to a temporary stop in 2007 with Anderson’s tour de force oil industry drama There Will Be Blood. But five years further along came The Master, an opportunity to reignite their camaraderie and ramp up Hoffman’s screen time in front of Paul Thomas Anderson’s cameras with a bombastic role as Lancaster Dodd, an enigmatic philosopher with a mind of his own.
The Master from IMDB:
A Naval veteran arrives home from war unsettled and uncertain of his future — until he is tantalized by The Cause and its charismatic leader.
The relationship between Lancaster Dodd and his erratic understudy Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is a total teacher/pupil dynamic amplified to disturbing degrees. Lancaster has molded and shaped his loyal members of “The Cause,” a nomadic family ideal for housing the uprooted, parentless, unemployed and continuously intoxicated war veteran Freddie Quell. In return, Dodd gets a muse, a bartender and a barbarian all in the form of a front line soldier with the relentless will to protect Dodd from his naysayers and harshest critics.
LANCASTER DODD: What a horrible young man you are. This is acting like an animal. A dirty animal that eats it’s own feces when hungry.
Whether Lancaster Dodd is any more of a motivational speaker than he is a cult leader depends on whom in the movie you give credence to. Lancaster has the interminable imagination of Dr. Seus, coupled with the grand gregarious personality of The Cat in the Hat. This is a man who could sell your own car right back to you by the sheer enthusiasm he has in his own sales pitch.
LANCASTER DODD: Your fear of capture and imprisonment is from millions of years ago. You are not there. You are asleep.
Here is a man steeped in ever-evolving mythology, some of which he has constructed with very little in the way of certifiable proof to back any of it up. Dodd expresses cosmic conjecture with his brand of bold, straight-faced certainty. He may have “processed” the past lives of his band of loyal subjects with test and training strategies, but not every open ear is a believer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw54-yDc6Jg
Even Lancaster’s own son Val is just tagging along for the freedom afforded him by the family business, quietly convinced his father’s body of work is a farce of pure fiction. But Dodd’s desire for complete control over his life and everyone he comes in contact with is clearly expressed when his authority and integrity get challenged, not behind his back, but right in front of him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJBjD9vJJaU
The conflict between the raw Neanderthal behavior of Freddie and the practiced calm intellectual stance of Lancaster are wisely compared through the juxtaposition of both men in prison. When Freddie rejects Lancaster’s “facts” while the two withering allies are jailed side by side, we see Dodd begin to slip out of character. His savvy confidence dissolves into a Sore Loser Syndrome that reduces Dodd to a childhood rebuttal of “nobody likes you” reverse psychology.
Dodd is not ready, or possibly even equipped, to release his grip on Freddie. But when the words of “The Cause” no longer reign supreme over Freddie’s fractured psyche, Dodd’s brainwash laundromat shifts from being that of “I can help you” to becoming “I am the only one who can help.”
LANCASTER DODD: If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you’d be the first person in the history of the world.
Even with Dodd’s immediate family warning him of the volatile nature of the Freddie Quell Spazfest, it is still Dodd who views any separation from Freddie as a failure. It couldn’t just have been Freddie’s “paint thinner cocktail” that kept Dodd rolling the dice with Freddie’s unpredictable nature, threatening to jeopardize everything he has worked for. It is this odd kinship that Lancaster finds in Freddie’s lost soul that makes his reluctance to rid himself of Freddie such an intriguing emotional plotline.
LANCASTER DODD: If you leave me now, in the next life you will be my sworn enemy. And I will show you no mercy.
For his huge unreserved temperament, his smoldering passion and his effortless leadership — Lancaster Dodd is one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s truly GREAT CHARACTER moments.
In February, we remember Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Thank you, Jason, for this post. Please join us in Comments to discuss final performance.
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