With a resume that boasts films like There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Director Paul Thomas Anderson steps into a new level of cult world that models itself on Scientology. The story opens like a pornographic South Pacific as we watch Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) as a sex-starved sailor in the Navy. Fast forward post-war 1950, he flunks some stress-psychological tests and finds himself shooting photographs in a department store for his 9 to 5.
And then along comes Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) PhD, MD, a.k.a. L. Ron Hubbard who tells him that he’s aggressive because he drinks too much, and then chooses to join him in tasting his homemade hooch. Hoffman tells Phoenix he’s “wandered from the Prophet path” and his wife (Amy Adams) has an equally contained role as Hoffman’s character, following him around all pregnant and hypnotized. She’s only interested in in Phoenix’s character because she wants him to influence Hoffman on his second book which he writes happiest “when he’s out to sea.” One can only hope that’s the reason behind Hoffman insisting that
Phoenix’s character stick around – despite rude outbursts, fistfights, and an inability to get along with the cult. In
one scene where Phoenix is asked to roam back and forth in an “informal processing” between the square footage of window and wall, we can’t help but wonder why Hoffman just didn’t show him to the door.
Yes, Phoenix’s character Freddie survived WWII but that’s an understatement. What he delivers is a deeply twisted and psychologically scarred character, with a performance so rich it reflects a range of DeNiro to Sean Penn. Yet for all his great unleashing, he’s unable to convince us to invest an interest in him, or to care about the two men at all. And that’s a concern
since the director invests more time into the two men and their “doings” then the religion itself. But questions are
raised: Can the mind be brought to a path from perfect to flawed? Is time travel hypnosis possible?
The film juggles crazy (Phoenix) and calm (Hoffman) and builds on the allure of the process, but in the end, as an audience we find our souls zapped. Two tiaras.