Paul Thomas Anderson is a person who is very famous, consistently makes big movies. Sometimes they’re big in scope, as with “There Will Be Blood” or “Boogie Nights.” But in those films or in “Magnolia” and “Punch-Drunk Love,” Anderson’s turf is the unspoken truth that lives inside his characters’ heads.
His newest, “The Master,” the season’s aboriginal Oscar contender, is appropriately immense while paradoxically getting tucked into a specific bend of the American psyche.
This superb, bookish blur about absolved acceptance is a fictionalized and acid ball hinging on the origins of Scientology. Scratch about a bit, though, and its added indictments become clear.
In 1950, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) absolutely seems forward-thinking if aboriginal encountered by Freddy Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). Freddy is a antsy World War II adept whose activity afterwards the Navy seems defenseless until, while ambuscade on a boat, he’s apparent by Dodd, his wife Peggy (Amy Adams) and followers of Dodd’s pseudo-scientific religion, alleged the Cause.
The absorbing Dodd is a writer, self-styled charlatan and absurd philosopher. He takes Freddy in as a bodyguard-cum-guinea-pig for “techniques” Dodd claims will advance the way to an avant-garde future. He promises to rid followers of the muck of accomplished lives.
The rough-edged Freddy, however, is abnormally impenetrable. He obeys Dodd, his mentor, yet he disappoints as an acolyte. If their assured breach comes, it diminishes one while allowance the added see the future’s possibilities.
As in writer-director Anderson’s added work, the acting in “The Master” mesmerizes. Hoffman, his face furnished with a affable moustache, is afresh absolute to the bone. His
Dodd is according locations charlatan and showman, and both his smile and his affront are things to avoid. Pulling his strings is Peggy, a animated banter of domesticity whom Adams makes as barbarous as a Philco fridge.
Phoenix gives the achievement of his career. Forget whatever aberancy he’s done in the past; Freddy is his masterpiece of quirk. Gaunt and round-shouldered — the amateur
resembles Montgomery Clift in his post-car-accident roles — Freddy is angled from his war experiences. Phoenix lets us see how the affliction and abhorrence eased by getting allotment of a movement never absolutely goes away.
While it dissects how a sci-fi writer’s notions became that movement, the blur wonders about the animal charge for clarity. Flash-forward to our accepted allure with scientology and celebrity, and watch “The Master” show the way.
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