The Master (2012)

When I first heard that Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of the There Will be Blood and Punch Drunk Love was going to make his next movie about Scientology I thought, in Hollywood, that takes a lot of guts. To clarify though The Master  both is an isn't about the religion created by the late science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. While the teachings of " Master " Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) are thinly veiled variations on actual Scientologist doctrine, the film is more generally about both a certain charismatic personality type that tends to attract cultish devotion, and a certain co-dependent personality type, here personified by Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell, who tend to almost require someone to cultishly devote themselves too.

The bulk of the films story is set circa 1950 and concerns Quell, a WWII navy vet/ photographer who has become a drifter, eking out a living doing various odd jobs and occasionally making a trademark alcoholic beverage out of paint thinner. One night a drunken Quell stows away on a boat that turns out to be taking a wedding party from California through the Panama Canal to New York. Overseeing the party is Lancaster Dodd, the author of a self-help pseudo-psychological/religious movement called "The Cause". The boat was lent him by a curious wealthy potential acolyte, and Dodd decided he would host is daughters wedding while they made their journey, along with a host of acolytes and hangers on. Dodd takes an instant liking to Quill and his brew and before long the latter ends up as part of The Masters inner circle, serving as a sort of defacto body guard and loyalty enforcer.

The movie is slow and almost documentary like, with long portions devoted to The Masters teachings and the exercises he puts his followers through. There is also a fair amount of space devoted to disputes and angling within the inner circle, with Dodd's current wife Peggy (Amy Adams) taking a large role in shaping the movement, and eventually coming to distrust Quill as an unstable competitor/influence on Lancaster, mostly through his strange brew. Though its called The Master the movie is mostly about Quill the follower, we get a fair amount of  his backstory, unhappy childhood, tendency to excess and his pinning for the girl he left behind years ago back home in Massachusetts. In the end when Quills time with The Master comes to an end its hard to tell how much those experiences helped him, and how much they hurt him, which is the mystery presented by any devotee with whom you do not share the same devotion. ***1/2