Not Connected - Three Films I Have Seen In The Past Few Days

Water For Elephants

There ought to be a golden rule of movie-making that if a major character in your film is going to be an elephant, then the film should be either a cartoon, a comedy or an art movie. It shouldn't be a horror film. Or an action-thriller. Or, in this instance, a romance with Robert Pattinson.

Initially, I thought that this was modelled on Titanic (with Pattinson as Kate Winslet and an elephant as the iceberg), taking as it does the form of a senior citizen's flashback and leading as it does up to – so I was excited to be informed in the opening stages – the third greatest circus disaster in living memory.

I was envisioning something along the lines of a live-action Dumbo, fifteen elephants unsteadily balanced on a single beach ball. In the event the disaster feels like an afterthought and the main focus is on a love triangle between Pattison (insipid), Reece Witherspoon (insipid) and ringmaster Christoph Waltz (excellent), all set to syrupy music. And then there's the elephant, Rosie, who Pattison has been hired to train. As he reclines in the hay with her, and the villainous Waltz sets about her with his big stick it becomes increasingly clear that she is looming large in the lovers' psychosexual dynamic - indeed, at one stage it's touch and go as to whether Pattison will walk off into the sunset with Witherspoon or the elephant (as it turns out - both).

Finally, even Waltz isn't enough to save this film from collapsing under the elephant's weight. I mean, why an elephant? A lion would have been more dramatic – or if they wanted to go for cute, how about a performing seal? Admittedly, the scene wherein Rosie finally turns on and kills Waltz would have been tougher to play with a seal, but I'm sure Waltz would have had a good go. As it is Rosie's murder of him is disappointingly casual – a mere single swipe with a tent peg. I was hoping for an extended scene in which he was viciously trampled into two dimensional form, thus bringing him into line with the rest of the characters.

The Master

The posters for this feature Rorschach blots, which is appropriate because different people have seen different things in this film. Some have seen a masterpiece; others, a load of old crap. As always with these love-it-or-hate-it films I didn't love or hate it. It was OK.

Joaquin Phoenix (channeling Popeye) plays a drunken sailor who at the end of World War II falls under the influence of Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the leader of a cult called The Cause. It is easy to see what these two see in each other – Phoenix needs a father figure and Hoffman needs a challenge – but less easy to feel it. Despite intimations of a suppressed homoerotic bond, there's no chemistry between them. They are both acting their little socks off, but they might as well be in separate films. Of course, the point is that they don't connect in the end, but we need to feel that they do at some level for the film to work emotionally – which is maybe why I left the cinema wondering what the point of it all was.

I blame the Germans – not only did they start the war which creates or enhances our sailor's malaise and generates a psychological need for 'The Cause' – they were also responsible for me seeing this film in the first place, since the film I'd initially bought a ticket for had been 'pulled' to go to the Berlin Film Festival, and it was either this or Here Comes The Boom.

I was alienated enough to come up with a self-conscious reading of The Master, in which the relationship between Hoffman and Phoenix is in fact a representation of that between director and audience. The chief benefit of this interpretation is that it lends the film a much-needed sense of humour – not only the wryly self-deprecating humour of the director (Paul Thomas Anderson) referring to himself as 'The Master' and depicting himself as a massive fraud, but the humour of embodying 'the audience' in the form of a drink-sodden freak with a penchant for fart jokes.

Conspirators Of Pleasure

If Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer had made Water For Elephants it wouldn't have had an elephant in it – 'Rosie's' role in the film would have been taken by, probably, a wardrobe. Come to think of it, that was exactly what the film needed.

In this dialogue-free film, we are privy to the secret desires of several characters who live alone (well, in one case it's a married couple, but they might as well live alone as he spends most of his time in the shed pleasuring himself with a range of mechanical brushes, and she, as a newsreader, spends most of hers on TV – when not indulging her fish fetish, that is). I saw this film as a hymn to the freedom you can enjoy when you live on your own. You can wear bat wings made out of an umbrella with a papier-mache cockerel's head. You can fill your head with doughballs. You can create a device that enables the TV to make love to you. The possibilities are endless.

However, there are consequences to these indulgences, as we come to realise when the newsreader enjoys a fish-generated orgasm on live TV. No man is an island, not even Joaquin Phoenix. Nevertheless – inspiring.