The Master, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Joaquin Phoenix as the skanky ex-WWII sailor, Freddie, who falls under the sway of The Master played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, has a broken-backed posture that is ape-like, consistent throughout the film. His arms curve down into his unhealthily skinny, strange parenthesis of a body, like a starved gorilla's, ready to break someone's skull -- if they say or do anything that runs counter to Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd, a Hemingway-cum-L. Ron Hubbard amalgam with all the animal charisma, robustness, and pseudo-sagacity of those epic characters. Is his Master at peace with such overreach? Dodd waggishly calls Freddie a "naughty boy" after such explosive incidents of lethal enforcement: here is his useful tool for control of others. Dodd's "processing" of the Id that is Freddie is not a cost-free transactional process. Freddie's mother is institutionalized. His sexual hunger is about debasement, not lust. He is a composite of a feral wild animal. The unhinged, barely civilized Freddie meets the happily idolized Dodd as a....
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