THE FIRST TIME we see Freddie Quell, the dipsomaniac drifter sex-fiend cult-devotee hero of Paul Thomas Andersons new film The Master, hes peering out over the bow of a ship. All we see of him are his eyes and forehead, shadowed by the brim of a combat helmet. Its just a flash. We dont know what hes looking at or what hes about to face, whether hes about to land on an enemy shoreline or go off on leave, just that its wartime in the Pacific. But whatever happens to Freddie in the war certainly leaves a mark. The next time we see him hes on a beach and clearly strung out, chopping coconuts with a machete like he has a mind to lop off his own hand. He celebrates V-J day by drinking ethanol out of torpedo engines. While the other sailors wrestle, Freddie simulates sex with a woman sculpted out of sand and masturbates into the surf. Back home, he flunks out of an early version of PTSD screening by claiming every Rorschach blot hes shown is either a cock or a pussy or a cock going into a pussy. At this point we start to wonder, why are we following this creep around? Wasnt this supposed to be a movie about Scientology?

The Master is P.T. Andersons sixth film. Over the past 16 years, hes put together a body of work that has made him stand out as one of a handful of bona fide American auteurs directors with a discernible vision, a recognizable visual style, and a commitment to the medium as an art form. Beginning with Hard Eight in 1996, hes made a suite of films in an array of genres and moods: a perfectly executed noir short story, a sprawling Altmanesque group portrait, a haphazard (and to my mind, somewhat curdled) paean to chance, a slim, darkly funny novella, and a return to the DeMille-Griffith fire and brimstone epic. All of them are held together by a fascination with a place (Southern California) and certain types of character (obsessed loners, orphaned children, surrogate fathers). Of all of these, The Master is his strangest and most elusive work. Hard Eight and Punch Drunk Love were genre pieces, however off-kilter. Boogie Nights is an exquisite ensemble piece, but its hardly mysterious. Magnolia and There Will Be Blood were driven by clear, if sometimes overly schematic, clashes. The Master is harder to characterize. Its a play on film history, an unresolved love story, a statement about conformity and rebellion. Above all its a struggle between two characters and two epochs, a duet in which nothing resolves or comes to a conclusion. Its as wide-open and complex a masterpiece, and as ambiguous and puzzling a film as has appeared in America since David Lynchs Mulholland Drive or Todd Hayness Safe.

Freddie is what sticks with you as you leave the theater. Hes like Robert De Niros characters in Mean Streets and Raging Bull as long as hes on screen you cant relax because something might happen to him, or he might do something terrible to someone else. You feel like youve gotten too close to his mania and his tics and you want to push him out. If youve ever been crazy, or known someone who is, you also recognize the terrible energy, like black electricity, which threatens to consume him and which he works so hard to deaden and contain. But even as Freddie is the most surprising and indelible thing about the film, the question remains: What is he doing here?

The answer has something to do with Freddies deep unease, the way he seems at odds and out-of-joint with his surroundings and the times. With his painfully hunched shoulders and a battered, deeply-lined face, he looks like an evolutionary throwback, an australopithecine John Garfield dropped off on the savannahs of a new continent. As played by Joaquin Phoenix, Freddie has the demeanor of a wounded animal. Tight spaces make him uncomfortable. Time and again, Anderson frames him in enclosures a chicken wire shack, a ships hold that make him visibly unhinged. Behind bars in actual prison, Freddie is a complete maniac. When he speaks he keeps his lips pressed together, talking out of the corner of his mouth like a stroke victim. And the damage extends to what he says: hes barely able to articulate a thought or access a memory. Though a creature of appetite, with a constant need for sex and drink, he doesnt have much success with women. Hes a wizard with booze, however a moonshine alchemist who can synthesize rotgut out of whatever happens to be at hand, whether its paint thinner or Lysol. Its this talent that ultimately wins him a place in a provisional community aboard the Masters yacht.

Early in the movie theres a striking interlude when hes working as a department store photographer. His suit looks like it may, at any second, strangle him. His job is to take stiff, formal portraits of ordinary American families. Theyre the visual equivalent of the new Levittowns springing up all over the country. In a beautiful, fluid sequence, scored to Ella Fitzgeralds rendition of Get Thee Behind Me Satan, he seduces (or is he seduced by?) an in-store model, but he passes out when they go to dinner. The following day, he assaults a fat businessman whos come to have his picture taken. Next, he turns up in a California cabbage field, a migrant farm worker. Before long, he accidentally poisons the patriarch of a laborer family and has to take off, running through the plowed fields pursued by a vengeful mob. On the run, he ends up at the North Bay docks. An exquisite gliding shot captures Freddie shambling in the foreground while a group of well-dressed revelers dance on the deck in the background. He stows away, passes out, and has his flask stolen. The next morning begins his involvement with The Cause.

From this moment, The Master becomes the story of the relationship between these two vastly different men. Its a story of initiation and servitude, and its a strange kind of love story, a wary dance between two figures who clearly stand for more than themselves. Lancaster Dodd, the self-styled master of the title, is a pompous charmer in charge of his own religion, called, prosaically enough, The Cause. Its a small-time cult with big-money donors, which promises its adherents a cure for all mental handicaps and certain forms of leukemia, as well as an end to nuclear war. Dodd has an enormous sense of his own importance. In his own words, hes a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher but above all I am a man. Hes a genial charlatan and a barely restrained bully, but hes also an immensely charismatic, frivolous, joyful presence. Dodd is a drinker and a gadabout, a blowhard and a fraud, a giddy charlatan and a theater ham. More than once, he leads his disciples in a satyr dance, and he draws Freddie to him with a giddy wedding toast about taming dragons until they roll over.

If Phoenixs Freddie descends from the early performances of DeNiro and Brando, Philip Seymour Hoffmans Dodd is Orson Welles, especially the self-consciously theatrical show-off of the later years, the man behind the curtain from Mr. Arkadin and the bogus magician of F is for Fake. You get the sense that if he didnt hold the keys to the last 60 trillion years of human spiritual existence, Dodd would have been a brilliant magician, as Welles was during the war years, when he was staging magic shows for the troops with Marlene Dietrich for an assistant, sawing Rita Hayworth in half every night while dreaming of running for president. And remember that, with the radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, Welles created, however briefly, his own moment of extraterrestrial awe and terror. But Anderson doesnt just call up Welles the magician; The Master also draws on the noir Welles, the Welles of impossible and dangerous desires. Sly references to Lady From Shanghai tumble throughout the film. Theres the initial stowaway sequence and the voyage on the Alethea from San Francisco to New York, the exact reverse of the course taken by Welless Michael OHara in Lady. Then theres the backstory with Freddies would-be child bride, whom he leaves to be an oiler on a merchant marine cruise to Shanghai. And finally, theres the song. In their final meeting, just as he is about to banish Freddie for good, Dodd sings him, Id like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China, in a low, steady voice, as if it were a lullaby or a plea. Its a shocking moment, at once comic, absurd, and tragically sexy one of the sexiest things Ive seen on screen in years. For these two, Shanghai is a ways off from Welless wickedest city in the world. Its their territory ahead, the dream space of their imaginary, infinitely displaced union.

Of course, on a more direct level, Dodds character and appearance are clearly modeled on L. Ron Hubbard, down to the self-description as a theoretical physicist. His movement, The Cause, strongly resembles the early version of Scientology, the one that became an overnight sensation thanks to the success of Dianetics. With some scrambling and compression of chronology, many of the events of Hubbards life are in The Master as well the sojourn on the boat, the refuge with wealthy patrons, the embezzlement, the party congress in Phoenix, the retreat to England are all based on fact, with the exception that the real story of Hubbards rise was much weirder and more sordid, featuring multiple divorces, a kidnapping, fraud charges, conspiracy theories, and a cabal of well heeled Southern California necromancers.

So what draws Dodd to Freddie and Freddie to Dodd? They have a strange sort of partnership. Dodd has his processing techniques and Freddie has his secret varnish-cocktail recipe. Literally and figuratively, they spend the movie drinking each others moonshine. More than that, an obvious erotic current runs between the two, especially from Dodd to Freddie. They wrestle and lock eyes. In his own life, Dodd is clearly under the thumb (and sexually, the hand) of his wife Peggy, played by the superb if underused Amy Adams, a fanatical believer in the movement and a jealous guardian of her husbands prestige. Maybe as recompense, Dodd enjoys having someone to dominate on his own. At times Freddies his disciple, at others, something closer to a slave. Hes also a science project, a lump of proletarian clay on which to test Dodds theories. For much of the middle portion of the film, Dodd treats Freddie like a savage pet, and seems to relish having such an animal at his command. Hes the violent id to his silken superego. He calls him naughty boy and dog, but at the same time clearly relishes the violence Freddie is willing to do in his name.

But the attraction between Freddie and Dodd has less to do with violence and control than with therapy, and with secrets. In return for his devotion, Dodd is able to give Freddie some kind of relief, which isnt that far from pain. The armys psychotherapy bounces off Freddie completely, but Dodd manages to open him up. In the movies most powerful scene, Dodd casually offers him a session of informal processing below decks. He forces Freddie to keep his eyes open without blinking, while answering a series of questions that go to the root of his shame and fear, his history of incest, alcoholism, family insanity. As he answers, the veins pop out of his face, a scene accompanied by extreme, almost sexual exertion. His past flows out of him, like a boil thats been lanced. Its a scene of incredible intensity, like watching a real life exorcism or someone speaking in tongues. But however effective this treatment is in the short term, it doesnt last, and at a deeper level Freddie never really succumbs to the appeal of The Cause.

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