Paul Thomas Anderson, 'The Master' Director, On Joaquin Phoenix, Dianetics And His 'Natural Attraction' For Redheads
Source:
Huffington Post
September 11, 2012 | Mike Hogan
"The Master" is a movie people are going to be talking about for a
long time. Paul Thomas Anderson's haunting meditation on friendship,
manipulation and man's desperate search for sanity is more enigmatic
than his earlier films -- it neither grabs you by the throat, like
"There Will Be Blood," nor twirls you around the dance floor, like
"Boogie Nights." When it screened at the Venice and Toronto film
festivals, the general response was:
Whoa, I'm going to need to see that again.
The film's central relationship -- and riddle -- concerns a troubled
World War II vet named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and a charismatic
sect leader named Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose
friends and followers call him Master. Dodd, who likes to preach that
humans are not animals and needn't be ruled by our emotions, is
fascinated by Freddie, a rage-filled loner whose idea of courting is to
scrawl "Do you want to fuck?" on a piece of paper and present it to the
object of his desire. (Don't worry: he also adds a smiley face.)
Freddie, in turn, is torn between his belief in the Master's power to
heal him and his suspicion that the whole thing is just another con. In
an early, face-to-face therapy session, Dodd proves that he can get
behind Freddie's defenses, but whether he can heal his unruly pupil is
less clear. Freddie, in turn, repays his would-be savior by violently
punishing anyone who dares to question Dodd -- an arrangement Dodd
clearly enjoys, despite his tepid protests to the contrary.
