Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a film about people searching desperately for a key to unlock the secrets of existence. And it focuses on two characters: one who can find no such key and one who convinces himself and others that he has found such a key. The former is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) who we first meet on an unnamed beach in the South Pacific during the last days of WW11 and who we follow for some time as he unsuccessfully struggles to quell internal turmoil and establish some semblance of normalcy in post-War America; and the latter is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is also battling unnamed dragons but who seems to have found some form of inner peace as the leader of an order/cult that promises members that human perfection is achievable in this lifetime if members allow themselves to be unlocked by Lancaster Dodd's magic key (which he calls processing). When Quell stows away on Dodd's yacht the two seem to recognize some common quality in each other. Dodd takes an interest in Quell's curious life, and as Quell learns more about Dodd's methods so do we. Processing is essentially psychoanalytic questioning that seeks to help members identify and neutralize past traumas so that they can eliminate negativity from their present lives and achieve that hoped for perfection. Its psychoanalysis but its psychoanalysis with a difference, the difference being that members are encouraged not only to recall past experiences but also to recall past lives. A lot has been made of the fact that this philosophy is loosely based on L. Ron Hubbards Scientology, but the film is less interested in the specifics of the actual philosophy than in the need of its followers to believe in something. This desperation to believe in something, however outlandish, is what interests PT Anderson (and what will resonate with audiences). This film is as intense as they come but its long and is not as consistently entertaining as the directors previous work (although for all of the reasons just mentioned it is his most ambitious and interesting). Its most powerful moments come when Dodd plays psychoanalytical father to lost pupil Quell. Quell's desperation and Dodd's need to dominate his pupil is palpable in these scenes that are unlike any I've seen in an American film. Quell's need to accept Dodd as a father figure is matched by an equal need to reject him as a guru. We're not asked to accept Quell as any kind of hero, just as an eternally lost soul. Freddie Quell, an existentially lost man for whom there are no answers, stands as the perfect antithesis to Lancaster Dodd, the man who refuses to live in a world where there are no answers (even if this means that he himself must invent those answers as he goes along). This is as existential as American filmmaking gets. There Will Be Blood may have wider appeal because it is about something all Americans can relate to, Greed. This film is about something fewer Americans will connect with: the meaninglessness of existence (or at least the difficulties of living without any existential certainties). This film is two hours long and there are no obvious payoffs, and some may hold PT Anderson accountable for the fact that there are no transcendent truths in The Master. But that is what makes this film so unusual and so daring.