The Master on 70mm

A cult exposé, a postwar psychodrama about power, and a two-hander featuring career-best performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix—The Master may be all these things, yet Paul Thomas Anderson himself has described it as being closer to a love story between one man who wants to save another, to “hug him and hold him in his pocket,” but perhaps also craves “the thrill of being bitten by him.” Freddie Quell, a WWII veteran rendered grotesquely singular by Phoenix, falls under the paternal, erotic, therapeutic, and commercial sway of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), leader of a mystic movement known as The Cause, with his wife Peggy (Amy Adams) embodying its disciplinary intelligence behind Dodd’s showmanship. Despite Scientology becoming the subject of serious institutional scrutiny by the early 2010s, Anderson was less interested in tabloid scandal than in Dianetics’ seductive, dangerous promise to a “victorious” postwar U.S., particularly the allure of secret past-life transgressions and obfuscated language accessible only to initiates. Beguiling and elliptical, The Master explores those who want to control and be controlled, to explain and be understood, and how a closed belief system can exploit a very human hunger for coherence and consolation. 

Filmed by Mihai Mălaimare Jr almost entirely in 65mm Panavision, with small amounts of 35mm material. Film at Lincoln Center is screening from one of the 5-perf 70mm prints struck for its 2012 theatrical release.