The Master

I really liked this one.  I expected a very different movie though.  I thought it was going to be about the formation of the Church of Scientology, detailing the scummy scammy cynical elements of the origins of the organization, and for sure it's got those aspects but more in a passing way than the straight up docudrama history lesson I anticipated.  I was captivated by what all went down - it's really a story of Phoenix's elemental man vs Hoffman's cerebral controlling man with Hoffman trying to own, tame, control, and dominate, with his bullshit religious dogma and psychobabble.  The methods might be suspect but the struggle and passion and belief are real as fuck.

Joaquin Phoenix plays a sailor, a drunken sailor, lost not so much at sea, but lost nonetheless.  He can't find his place, he's always wandering and running from himself, running from one drunken debacle to the next.  He's impulsive and wild, full of an angry passion and seems to yearn for meaning and love, but at the same time is afraid of both.  

Philip Seymour Hoffman is the guru, the man at the apex of his fledgling cult - modeled on Scientology, but here called The Cause.  He hides from everyone his true motives and I'm not even sure what he wanted aside from power.  I kept wondering whether he really believed the fantastical garbage he was forcing down the throat of his followers, but I'm pretty sure he was just using their search for meaning, and plugging their holes with his ideas to feed his ego.  I felt sorry for his duped followers eh?

I was really reminded of my father watching this.  He wasn't old enough for this to be his era, but his sensibilitiy and resemblance  to both men would be obvious to all who knew him.  He was a drunk and a smart man both.  Hoffman looked like him complexion wise and he was more similar to him in intellect, but his soul was more Joaquin's.  A sad man, a man who felt adrift and unmoored often, yet still stupidly prideful and arrogant at his part in the making of his own misery too, and so continued to hoe that row of unyeilding dirt.  Ain't gonna harvest nothing from there but sweat and pain.  

Dichotomy and despair, it's served up raw with a side of bitter sweet cynicism in this tale of thwarted love.