Dinesh Kamath's film column 'The Master' under the title 'New movie-releases in Navi Mumbai' that was published in Newsband

New movie-release in Navi Mumbai

By Dinesh Kamath

The Master

The Master is a 2012 American drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. It tells the story of Freddie Quell (Phoenix), a World War II veteran struggling to adjust to a post-war society who meets Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), a leader of a religious movement known as "The Cause" who sees something in Quell and accepts him into the movement. Freddie takes a liking to "The Cause" and begins traveling with Dodd along the East Coast to spread the teachings.

The film was partly inspired by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, but also used early drafts of There Will Be Blood, stories Jason Robards had told Anderson about his drinking days in the Navy during the war, and the life story of John Steinbeck.

The film received three Academy Award nominations for Best Actor for Phoenix, Best Supporting Actor for Hoffman, and Best Supporting Actress for Adams.

Like a lot of Anderson's previous work, the film is about pioneers, leaders and dysfunctional families, and it is about the origins of American modernity, the pre-history of a certain kind of self-help and self-belief, entrepreneurial and evangelical. In this case, it is the Year Zero of a belief system that does not yet have extreme age to put its irrationality above reproach. The Master is about homemade spirituality and gimcrack philosophy, a snake-oil salesman of religion offering self-medication of the mind and body, attracting desperately lonely and vulnerable people to his new cult. It all happens in a meticulously realized postwar America, with bizarre set pieces and an extra-terrestrial strangeness all of its own.