The Master wasn’t made to poke fun at Scientology, which it doesn’t. If anything, it gave me a way to look at it sympathetically. The Master is about a man who, for the first part of the movie, is constantly running away until he finally finds a reason to stay and/or isn’t being chased off. That reason is his deep relationship with The Master, who is not afraid of Freddy. They are opposites who are drawn to each other for that reason, but like all opposites, they share common ground albeit a very small patch-a frustration and anger. Freddy is all “animal”: a sex obsessed, farting, crude and violent drunkard who has long since left the inner world of reflection from fear of all that is actually there long before he became a veteran. The Master is calm, personable, charismatic, obsessively living in the inner world with the goal of becoming pure spirit and conquering the crude desires of the flesh. Freddy responds to The Master’s kindness and the opportunity to finally stop fighting himself. The Master responds to Freddy’s naughtiness: his cigarettes, his booze, his fight. They both share a ground of outrage waiting to bubble up and lash out, but rarely at each other, only at others. They try to convert the other to their side and take turns winning. They are psychological brothers: Freddie is all id, and The Master is all super-ego, but Peggy Dodd, The Master’s wife, played unflinchingly by Amy Adams, is all ego. The Master works perfectly for the first 1 hour and 23 minutes then loses focus and falls apart. I’m not sure if that is what Paul Thomas Anderson intended, but it happened and started during and subsequent to a ten-minute sequence of Freddy being put through a gauntlet of mental exercises. I think that the big mistake was to stop following Freddy, the main character played by Joaquin Phoenix, and get the inside perspective of The Master or Lancaster Dodd, played by the master actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman. It briefly became less about Freddy and more about the gradual descent of a movement in his eyes. Only a must see for an audience really interested in amazing acting or Paul Thomas Anderson.
As a side note, after I watch a movie, I like to read about it on Wikipedia and imdb to confirm whether or not others share my perspective on the film. In the imdb trivia section, I found out that Paul Thomas Anderson did NOT cast his mixed race children in one scene that takes place in a non-Southern department store during the 1950s because they did not have a “period appropriate look.” The frack? There have been mixed race children since the dawn of this country BEFORE it became the United States. What does authenticity for a fictional period piece have to do with anything? I just finished watching the first season of a tv series that occurs in Denmark and Sweden, Bron/Broen, interpreted as The Bridge. It has more diversity in it than most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, and for authentic purposes, could cast all blond blue-eyed people, but chose not to. When the father of mixed race children and one of the most amazing American directors of our time lacks the imagination to have a brief cameo with his children or any mixed race children in a movie, then I begin to lose hope for our film industry, especially since The Master without any explanation or back story has an Arab American actor playing a prominent supporting role–which I am happy about, but a child of black and white parents briefly appearing in a store is considered unfathomable and unrealistic. Disappointing!