The Master: Cold & Calculated

The Master is a gorgeous film with scenes and settings bursting with cinematic beauty. The cast of Joaquin Phoenix, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams, present a dramatic tour de force, acting their guts out and presenting vivid characters that are passionate and complicated and disturbing. The soundtrack, composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, is eerie and engaging. But despite all of these promising pieces, the film doesn't come together as a compelling viewing experience. Instead, you're left wondering, what's the point of it all?

The film is set just after World War II and Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, an alcoholic veteran who seems incapable of readjusting to post-war life. He initially finds work as a photographer in a department store but is forced to flee when his ungovernable temper leads to a fight with a customer. He then works at a cabbage farm, only to poison one of the migrant workers with the moonshine that he likes to brew with all manner of toxic ingredients. Fleeing once again, Freddie ends up as a stowaway on a yacht belonging to Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), an enigmatic and charismatic man who is the leader of "The Cause," a movement that involves hypnosis, theories of past lives, psychological probing called "Processing", and other sundry beliefs standard to most cults. Dodd discovers Freddie on board but is intrigued by this strange man and asks him to stay on. He subjects Freddie to some Processing, thereby revealing some sordid details of Freddie's family history. Dodd's wife, Peggy (Adams), is initially happy to bring Freddie into the fold, but as his alcoholism and violent tendencies begin to cause trouble, she and her children grow increasingly worried that Freddie is too unstable. But Dodd remains unconvinced and continues to subject Freddie to the various tests and rituals that every acolyte must go through to become a member of The Cause.

The Master is ostensibly a take on Scientology and other cultish religions that burgeoned in the post-war period. But it is mired in a vagueness that plagues the entire narrative and make the film feel like a thoroughly pointless exercise in filmmaking. Presumably writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson wanted to avoid overt comparisons to Scientology and its ilk, so he offers up no clues as to the history and beliefs of The Cause or Lancaster Dodd himself. The focus is on the disturbed Freddie, but over the course of two hours, the character appears to stagnate, learning nothing at all when he is with The Cause or away from it. By the end, we seem to have come full circle, with all the characters continuing to behave as they did from the beginning, with no resolution, or even promise of where the story might go from here.

The Master engages your senses, with stunning visuals, a mesmerizing soundtrack, and three acting performances that earned well-deserved Academy Award nominations. Yet somehow, that is not enough. A good movie should tell a good story but The Master is like a sketch show of riveting scenes that don't tie in to any coherent narrative. It offers an experience but not much emotion, and by the end I was simply bored. For many people, The Master was one of the best films of the year, but for me, it was simply a bewildering movie that had nothing to say.