‘The Master’ presents a laughless parody of Scientology

BY RIGHTS, any movie about a quasi-religion invented by a sci-fi writer and practiced by movie stars at a celebrity center ought to be a comedy.

And one was, in the form of Steve Martin's funny and underrated "Bowfinger," wherein Scientology went by the name Mindhead and Eddie Murphy played its Hollywood practitioner and cash cow.

Now comes "The Master," and the job of probing Scientology's roots and meaning has fallen to the formidable Paul Thomas Anderson. Anyone who saw "There Will be Blood," this movie's kissing cousin, will know that "Master" has been mostly scrubbed clean of humor.

A scowling and slurring Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, a World War II Navy man with a combat-related stress disorder and a drinking problem who drifts destructively around the U.S. until he meets the Svengali-like Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), loosely but obviously modeled on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

One of Anderson's recurring metaphors here is the idea of being "at sea," and that's where the two men meet - Dodd is a self-styled writer/healer piloting a ship full of believers to New York, where he plans to unveil a sequel to the book (akin to Dianetics) that made him famous.

Quell mocks what he sees, until he sits down with Dodd for a "reading." Here, Anderson unleashes his actors to produce a truly riveting scene - through Phoenix, we see Freddie's cynicism fall away under Dodd's penetrating gaze and questions, and Hoffman shows Dodd as a figure of enormous personal magnetism and natural gifts as a therapist.

These are in addition to Dodd's peerless skills as a B.S. artist whose books and teachings have attracted the interest of wealthy benefactors and clients, in whose parlors he likes to hold court.

This yields more good stuff - the Manhattan home of a dowager donor where Dodd encounters an intellectual antagonist, and the mansion of another socialite (Laura Dern) where comically skeptical Philadelphia police arrest Dodd for practicing medicine without a license (a charge leveled at Dianetics practitioners in the 1950s).

These scenes also show a change in the drifting and detached Freddie, who appoints himself to be Dodd's enforcer, even as he remains suspicious of Dodd's teachings (to the alarm of Dodd's quietly ruthless wife, an against-type Amy Adams).

"The Master" uses Scientology as a model, but you get the feeling Anderson could have picked any newfangled spiritual invention - after all, we have no shortage of bagwans, Koreshes and sweat-lodge operators.

America is fertile land for crackpot spirituality, and what "The Master" wants to know is why, and why now. It's like something Graham Greene might have come up with had he detoured from Catholicism to dabble in Scientology, probing the tension between pull of belief and the individual's natural disinclination toward submission.

The movie's focus is the damaged and confused Freddie (Dodd doesn't appear for half an hour), and its subject is his dislocation, not his indoctrination.

This dislocation seems to arise from his place in the middle of the 20th century, after the second world war. Were the war's atomic bombs, mass mechanized death and terrifying nihilism beyond the reach of traditional religious institutions? (The movie opens on V-J Day, with Freddie tasked with disarming a torpedo.)

Even if Dodd were possessed of nothing more than a con-man's genius for telling people what they wanted to hear, what was this modern void he was filling?

Answers in the "The Master" are elusive, and the movie's early sharpness gives way to something fuzzier and less satisfying. Though there are echoes in the Dodd-Quell dynamic of the central relationship in "There Will Be Blood," there is no definitive resolution - no one is beaten to death in a bowling alley.

What sticks in your mind is a desert scene of Freddie taking Dodd's motorcycle for a spin and failing to return. The movie seems to head off with him, evaporating in the shimmering heat of the horizon.

Contact movie critic Gary Thompson at 215-854-5992 or thompsg@phillynews.com. Read his blog at philly.com/KeepItReel.

REVIEW |

The Master

DIRECTED BY PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON. WITH PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, JOAQUIN PHOENIX, AMY ADAMS, JESSE PLEMONS, LAURA DERN. DISTRIBUTED BY THE WEINSTEIN CO.

PARENT'S GUIDE: R (SEX)

RUNNING TIME: 132 MINUTES

PLAYING AT: AREA THEATERS