The Weinstein Company
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in "The Master." “The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s imposing, confounding and altogether amazing new film, is partly concerned with the life and work of one Lancaster Dodd, leader of a therapeutic, quasi-religious cult known as the Cause. Dodd’s “process,” a stew of Freud, hypnosis and carnival sideshow mumbo-jumbo, is based on a kind of mental time travel. The subject is led, by a series of pointed, painful questions, on a search for past trauma — earlier in life, before birth, in a previous existence — that can be identified as the source of negative emotion and destructive behavior in the present.* * * *
Stephanie Doty"Our minds sometimes play tricks on us, substituting invention for memory. Movies turn this lapse into a principle, manufacturing collective fantasies that are often more vivid, more real, than what actually happened. “The Master,” unfolding in the anxious, movie-saturated years just after World War II, is not a work of history in the literal or even the conventionally literary sense. The strange and complicated story it has to tell exists beyond the reach of doubt or verification. The cumulative artifice on display is beautiful — camera movements that elicit an involuntary gasp, passages in Jonny Greenwood’s score that raise the hair on the back of your neck, feats of acting that defy comprehension — but all of it has been marshaled in the pursuit of a new kind of cinematic truth. This is a movie that defies understanding even as it compels reverent, astonished belief. "
Weary of Wonderland
February 3, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
