The Master

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

2012 / 138min / 35mm

Anderson’s aching, ambitious, and deeply ambiguous psychodrama pairs alcoholic ex-serviceman Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and messianic flimflam man Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in a cage match bromance that doubles as a meditation on the groundswell of new faiths—Dodd’s Scientology-like “The Cause” as well as, implicitly, Method acting—amid postwar American prosperity. Laura Dern’s Helen Sullivan, a wealthy Phoenix benefactor who has the temerity to pose questions concerning inconsistencies in Dodd’s slapdash religion, is crucial in cracking the mountebank’s façade, which disintegrates over the course of this strange, sensuous film, to many minds one of the premier cinematic accomplishments of the 21st century.