The general impression I get from the media and from friends that have seen this film is that The Master is viewed as a somewhat muddled film with great characters and performances and impressive intellectual content. It is actually a really boring, incoherent film, with extremely poor character development, very mediocre performances, and almost zero intellectual content.

Let’s begin here: Any piece of art on a topic like this should manage to say something substantive about the grander phenomenons of faddishness and guru-following that virtually define America as a society. The Master completely fails to do this. Worse than that, it can’t even adequately describe this one particular cult. Its portrayal of “The Cause” lacks any meaningful details about its philosophical underpinnings, its technical particulars, the nature of its emotional hold on its followers, or the relation of its genesis to Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character. You get that there’s an element of past life regression stuff (to what exact end we are not told,) and that there’s also some kind of amorphous moral code that is never directly described, but beyond these pathetic cliches it’s like they just couldn’t be bothered to explain anything. Instead, they throw out all these random scenes and leave it to the audience to put it all together. It’s lazy filmmaking at its most repugnant.

There is a decent amount of dialog in the movie, but it’s not good dialog. It’s very empty dialog, some of it flashy, but most of it pretty boring. There is zero character development in the film, and the only consistent theme is a bizarre condemnation of human sexuality which is never explicitly tied to the philosophy of The Cause. With all the things The Master fails to do, it should be no surprise that the film wastes tremendous amounts of on-screen time: for example, the first half-hour of the film is Joaquin Phoenix doing odd jobs, to establish that he is a “lost soul.” This kind of crap almost makes you wish Anderson had just used a narrator – then the film could have been a half-hour shorter!

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is not the slightest bit believable as a charismatic guru. He has no magnetism of any sort – he’s ugly, he has no charisma, and he has no gravitas as an orator. In fact, the best way to describe him and his behavior in the film is “gross” and “embarrassing.” The biggest problem is that his reactions when his work is challenged are all wrong – no one would follow this guy anywhere after seeing even one instance of his clumsy emotional outbursts the second anything unscripted happens in his presence. You want to watch a movie that gets the guru personality spot-on? One that captures exactly how real gurus manipulate people and maintain control? Watch Brit Marling’s The Sound of My Voice, and then tell me how convincing Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s bumbling, oafish guru is.

The character through whom you experience “The Cause,” played by Joaquin Phoenix, is a violent, alcoholic sociopath who can barely speak. Talk about closing off dialog possibilities! Hoffman’s conversations with Phoenix are ridiculous, and the viewer instantly recognizes that the scenes of his “processing” at the hands of Hoffman are destined to devolve into a kind of grotesque comedy, and indeed they do, culminating with the extended “fuck you” shouting match between the two of them in jail. As for Joaquin Phoenix’s acting, I think more and more that he is not so much an actor as simply a weirdo. Didn’t he say he was giving up acting? Why on earth did he decide to go back on that tantalizing declaration?!

Put it all together, and there is simply no reason to watch this film.