The Master (MA). Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern. 137 minutes
Navy personnel on sabbatical sculpt the form of a spread-eagled woman from sand. One stands by, leering, before suddenly pouncing on the prone figure and humping it extravagantly. This is a key character insight: Freddie Quell (Phoenix) is preoccupied with sex, and inclined to regard women as objects of gratification.
But Freddie is also disturbed. He is oblivious to the bemusement of his onlookers, and moments later he wades into the shallows of the sea to unabashedly masturbate. It is likely that his experiences in the war (World War II) have exacerbated, but are not the root cause of, his obviously disordered psyche. American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master is in large part an ambiguous and unsettling portrait of this bizarre loner.
Freddie falls in with a cult known as The Cause, led by the charismatic Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman). Freddie initially wins Lancaster's favour thanks to his knack for concocting robust chemical cocktails that appeal to the cult leader's proclivity for booze. Their relationship gradually takes on a kind of symbiotic and mutually destructive father-son dimension. Each man has his own charisma, and holds the other in thrall.
The Master, truth be told, suffers from some infuriatingly, deliberately oblique plotting, which makes its two-plus hours feel bloated rather than epic. But if you set aside expectations of clarity and resolution, and bask in The Master's exquisite period detail, director of photography Mihai Malaimare Jr's magnificent cinematography, and the gorgeously ear-grinding score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, The Master is a captivating cinematic treat.
Bask, too, in the joy of watching Phoenix and Hoffman — great actors both — share the screen. Watch the tics and twists of Freddie/Phoenix's skewiff face as Lancaster subjects him to a sadistic game of 20 Questions; a pseudo-psychological process designed to cement the pastor-protégé hierarchy. Later, watch Lancaster/Hoffman simmer then explode at a cynic's questions, silencing dissent with fury. This is top shelf acting.
Lancaster's human foibles threaten to undo him. His alcoholism, like Freddie's sex addiction, is a pothole on the path to purity. A latter revision of his teachings allows for subjectivity where previously there was absolutism, to the chagrin of at least one particularly devout disciple (Dern). There are hints that for Lancaster, money and power are central, ulterior motives. His pious wife (Adams) struggles to keep him on the