The Master
First screened in August 2012 / Most recently screened in October 2025
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Ambyr Childers, Rami Malek, Jesse Plemons, Madisen Beaty, Laura Dern, Kevin J. O'Connor, Patty McCormack, Lena Endre, Amy Ferguson, Barbara Brownell, Jennifer Neala Page. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson.

 Twitter Capsule: (Aug 2012) Boldface yet elliptical. Adventurously but vexingly disjointed. Profits and suffers from haze surrounding focal figures.

Second Capsule: (Nov 2012) Less flummoxing second time. Phoenix still wows, idiosyncrasies impress, but affectations run about even with ideas.

Second Capsule: (Oct 2025) Still reject the ending. But whatever the flaws, Freddie Quell is an unforgettable figure. Historical vision enthralls.

VOR: ⑤  Leaving aside the fortitude to make a pretty scathing film about a notably litigious religion, every single other aspect is just as bold a swing.


   
Photo © 2012 The Weinstein Company / Annapurna Pictures
It'd be one thing if Lancaster Dodd just needed Freddie Quell's febrile, ungovernable entropy and Freddie needed Lancaster's pretense, however dubious, of steady, patient authority. The Master could have been a well-acted and boldly contextualized return to a very familiar dialectic. But both men also seem to need each other's undisguised weirdness: Freddie's ferret-brained compulsion toward death-risking cocktails and reckless sexual partnerings, Lancaster's poker-faced salesmanship of the most rococo "spiritual" fabrications and his officious toting around of a family to whom he is nakedly indifferent, except as entourage. Freddie's beady eyes and broken posture, like a stick insect somebody just snapped, or tried to. Lancaster's seal-slick skin and his Tár-like fusion of brazen, self-loathing mendacity and absolute indignation at being caught out in barely-concealed deceptions.

What a pair! After three viewings, though this is my first in 13 years, I still can't calculate to what extent The Curious Case of Freddie and Lancaster is an exportable parable (of nation, of gender, of era, of quackery and consent to quackery) or a defiantly singular digest of the run-in between two unreproducible people. Maybe it's both, and in that way an extension of America's dogged insistence that its citizens (or its preferred citizens) must at once be an absolutely distinctive, don't-tread-on-me individual and an exemplar of transhistorical concepts, a molecule containing multitudes, an avatar of the Free and the Brave. Maybe that's the dialectic The Master is about: the fear of being no one and the added pressure of having to be Everyone, or a paragon, when it's hard enough just being your cracked, average, perhaps even criminal self. Who or what is "master" in that scenario? I wonder what would happen and where we'd all be taken if Anderson ever made a companion film called The Slave, on equally personal and panoramic themes.

I still love the photography and most of the production design in The Master, preceding Carol in throwing ice-cold water on our habit of remembering the 1950s (for white people) as a Pleasantville of pastels and primaries. I love the music and the inventive editing. And as great as Hoffman also is, Joaquin Phoenix gives one of the century's defining film performances, as far as I'm concerned: utterly unique, but with infinite points of unsettling intersection with people and problems we know well (but surely not with ourselves, surely not!). I struggle a bit with the script's piecemeal structure, even as I'm happy to grant that the scenes are meant to feel like forbidding floes gliding loosely down the same sulphurous river, never to be joined. The final stretches still feel to me like a letdown, the characters beyond the two protagonists never feeling more than half-sketched. Those are real problems, but at the same time, maybe Anderson's in part a victim of his own audacious success: maybe nothing in The Master can match the unsettling force of Freddie himself as we initially encounter him, intractably alone even when he's with others, over those first, tragic, hypnotic 20 minutes.

Maybe in any good wrestling match, and The Master is at many levels a great one, you eventually stop being able to tell exactly who's who, and what's going on, and everybody falls away except the two grappling. And even then we don't necessarily see them, we see the ongoing grapple. Grade: B+

(in August 2012: B)
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Actor: Joaquin Phoenix
Best Supporting Actress: Amy Adams
Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman

Golden Globe Nominations:
Best Actor (Drama): Joaquin Phoenix
Best Supporting Actress: Amy Adams
Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman

Other Awards:
Venice Film Festival: Best Director; Best Actor (Hoffman and Phoenix); FIPRESCI Prize
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Director; Best Actor (Phoenix); Best Supporting Actress (Adams); Best Production Design (William Crank and Jack Fisk)
National Society of Film Critics: Best Supporting Actress (Adams); Best Cinematography (Mihai Malaimare, Jr.)
Boston Society of Film Critics: Best Cinematography
Chicago Film Critics Association: Best Supporting Actress (Adams); Best Supporting Actor (Hoffman); Best Cinematography; Best Original Score (Jonny Greenwood)
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