Critics reviews

Paul Thomas Anderson's ambitious, powerful and ultimately elegiac masterpiece centres on the question of whether man is, in fact, an animal... It all ends cryptically – and hauntingly. A mysterious phone call, a wistful serenade, an unseen goodbye. Repeat viewings confirm that this singular creation of Dodd was indeed Hoffman's apotheosis, which would be apt, and even funny, if it weren't so, so sad.

[My theory that Freddy is actually a dog] was seemingly confirmed by a scene in which Freddie, coming home to Dodd's house after a spell in prison, hugs his "master" and is then wrestled to the ground. As the two roll around on the residence's front lawn, playfully grappling with each other and laughing with abandon... it is difficult for the viewer to comprehend this scene as in any way realistic if it is not understood that Joaquin Phoenix is in fact playing the part of a pooch.

It's an immaculately photographed film, but on a decidedly more miniaturized pictorial scale than the grandiosity Anderson has been building and refining throughout his career... With its lengthy scrutiny of human faces, its flexible telephoto master shots, and its restrained, un-showy production design, The Master finds the appropriate visual matches for this fragile attention to acting.

...What I had found frustrating upon two viewings back in 2012, I suddenly found strangely poetic and emotionally profound... Emotion versus intellect, action versus thought, wilderness versus civilization: These fundamental forces of humanity are placed in direct opposition to each other in The Master, and the vividly contrasting performance styles of Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman are crucial to understanding why these dichotomies feel so potent as they play out onscreen.

People who called The Master nihilistic are missing the point. The film laments the emotional toll of nihilism, and its power resides in Anderson's disinterest in playing his characters against one another as he did in There Will Be Blood.

The indeterminate spaces of Anderson's film leave plenty of room for the viewer to fill in, making The Master easily the best movie this year to talk about. It isn't a great film – but it has a great film rattling around inside it, the story of deadlocked Freddie Quell, a dynamic study in stasis.

The Master is [hard] to characterize. It's a play on film history, an unresolved love story, a statement about conformity and rebellion. Above all it's a struggle between two characters and two epochs, a duet in which nothing resolves or comes to a conclusion. It's as wide-open and complex a masterpiece, and as ambiguous and puzzling a film as has appeared in America since David Lynch's Mulholland Drive or Todd Haynes's Safe.

Anderson's visual style is ultimately more audience-directed than consciousness-representative. If the film is a therapy session, the viewer is the analysand; we are Quell to Anderson's Freud. Interpreting the grotesque nudes as real or imagined or otherwise is entirely a question of taste, of what thematic pattern one wishes the scene to perpetuate, and reflects our own predilections more so than any underlying allegory.

What makes Quell such a fascinating and, in his own way, heroic figure is not that he resists succumbing to The Cause in this instance but that he so casually re-manifests his innate being, which they have attempted to obscure.

The multiple story lines of earlier Anderson films give way to the dyad in which Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd circle around each other in a slow dance of attraction and repulsion. The simplification of structure yields an operatic power, with all superfluous details elided and the drama grounded in these two figures.

Behind it all is Anderson's Zen-like refusal to hit all the usual plot points or tidy up his characters' messy lives. In fact, the movie's "happy" ending is actually disorienting; just as Dodd keeps his followers off balance, Anderson remains firmly ambivalent to the end. Who's ready to see it again?

This intentional smallness becomes The Master's major flaw. What makes the film's second half so frustrating is the way it refuses to resolve any of the problems Anderson introduces so potently—through careful cuts, visual shorthand, and immersive juxtapositions of sound and image—in the first half. The film creates Freddie, and then languishes in him.