The Master (2012)

This movie is incredibly intense but I am not sure what it was about.  The movie has two great performances in it, but it is not a great movie.  Joaquin Phoenix, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams were all nominated for Academy Awards for their work in this movie, but despite having the most actors of any movie nominated, the film did not garner a Best Picture nomination.  There are several things that do not hang together well when all is said and done.  The performances that are delivered are compelling, but somehow the viewer isn't left with much.  Where did the movie go?  What were we supposed to learn along the way?  What was the take home message?  I do not always require that those questions be answered--let's face it, almost every action adventure movie would leave you answering those three questions with nowhere, nada, and nothing, and of course I watch and enjoy all too many of those!  I cannot exactly put my finger on it, but this movie left me feeling like I needed a bit more to really walk away from it feeling satisfied.

So here is the story.  The movie doesn't say so, but Phillip Seymour Hofman plays Lancaster Dodd, who is  someone who is so closely based on L. Ron Hubbard there can be no doubt that it is about him.  But the main character is someone who is a disciple of his, Freddy Quell (Joaquin Phoenix).  Freddy was a WWII veteran, just like Hubbard himself, but in scenes that we see of him early on it is clear that he is a disturbed man.  Maybe it is the war, maybe it is the alcohol, maybe it is the stuff he makes and bottles and drinks in excess, and maybe it is who he was before all this started, but Freddy is intense, violent, unpredictable, and not much of a talker.  He produces the toxic elixir that Dodd is addicted to, so they have a pathologic relationship of dependency on each other.  Quell seems down right nuts, with a large dose of dangerous on top, but Dodd manages the crazy and side steps the violence, and the two are together more or less to the end, despite Mrs. Dodd very correctly identifying the pathology and trying to put an end to it.  That is pretty much the whole thing right there.  We never really figure out all the detail's of Dodd's 'Cause', where the money comes from, what the price of admission is, or much about the indoctrination of adherents.  It is not a boring movie--far from it--it is unsettling, but for me, it left more questions than it answered.