You've seen the two short teasers. Now, finally, you can watch an official trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” The movie, which stars Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams, is Thomas’s already controversial look at a religion that in no way whatsoever is meant to resemble Scientology. If the hubbub surrounding the film or the talent involved weren’t reason enough reason to be excited, the new footage (some but not too much of which appeared in the teasers) would be enough to hook anyone who cares about important cinema.
Though there’ve been hints at the film’s story, this trailer is more explicit: Phoenix’s Freddie Quell is a haggard man adrift in postwar America and unable to escape his painful past. Until, that is, he meets Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, a writer/doctor/nuclear physicist/theoretical philosopher who in no way whatsoever resembles L. Ron Hubbard. The two men apparently become obsessed with one another, locked in a love/hate relationship which culminates in the two riding motorcycles into each other in the desert. That’s how it’s looking, at least.
Another nice treat, for “Friday Night Lights” fans at least, the presence of Jesse Plemons, a.k.a. Landry “Lance” Clarke, Dodd’s son, who’s got no problem calling his father out: “He’s making this up as he goes along. Don’t you see that?” That, along with another, unnamed character's opinion that, “Good science, by definition, allows for more than one opinion, otherwise you merely have the will of one man, which is the basis of a cult,” makes it seem as if Anderson & Co. aren’t big fans of the obviously fictional religion at the center of their movie.