Watching The Master for the first time requires you to accept that you will not fully understand it during the viewing.

PTA's films have generally been plotted — Boogie Nights has a rise-and-fall structure, There Will Be Blood has a rivalry that resolves, Inherent Vice has a mystery. The Master has none of these. It's organized around the relationship between Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd, but that relationship doesn't build toward anything. It circles.

What the film is about — and I say 'about' loosely — is the question of whether a person can be changed. Dodd believes he can change Freddie. Freddie believes Dodd can change him. Neither is wrong and neither is right. The processing sequences are extraordinary precisely because they're not showing us transformation — they're showing us two people looking for transformation in each other and not finding it.

The performances by Phoenix and Hoffman are matched in a way that is rare in American cinema. They're not playing the same kind of performance. Hoffman is giving a controlled, theatrical, oratorical performance. Phoenix is giving an animalistic, physical, barely-verbal one. The contrast is the relationship.