I can recall how when "Apocalypse Now" first came out, viewers almost universally loathed the ending. After the forward motion of the first two hours, the film seemed to just run out of steam; Brando's shadowy rambling seemed an anticlimax, and reports that Francis Ford Coppola had agonized for months over how to end it didn't help. And yet viewed now, it seems perfect, like the only logical conclusion.
Maybe decades from now we'll think the same about Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master," which is a very good film for seven or eight innings until it suddenly finds itself unable to put the ball over the plate. Working off some intense performances by Joaquin Phoenix as an alcoholic World War II vet with a short fuse (what we'd now call PTSD) and Philip Seymour Hoffman as an L. Ron Hubbard sort of culty spiritual huckster, Anderson builds a gripping push-pull chemistry between the guru and his roughneck disciple. But unlike Col. Kurtz and Cpt. Willard — or even Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday in "There Will be Blood" — the end of their journey feels like a cop-out, extremely vague and unsatisfying.
"The Master" will keep you gripped up until then, thanks largely to Phoenix, whose troubled vet Freddie Quell is the most complex antihero in American cinema since Robert De Niro's boxer in "Raging Bull." Fond of making mind-altering cocktails with whatever alcohol and chemicals are at hand, Freddie is a word-slurring ball of rage and insecurity, which makes him an irresistible test subject for Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) and his id-revealing method of "processing" (modeled loosely on the Church of Scientology's "auditing").
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