Rated R

There’s a lot to love in the dark, dreamy movies of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson. The ridiculous and fantastic world of “Boogie Nights” (1997) put Anderson front and center as a solid but refreshingly quirky filmmaker, while “Magnolia” (1999) played like a set of entwined poems about a sprawling and diverse set of characters set to a beautiful score by Aimee Mann. “Punch Drunk Love” (2002) told a much more focused and delightfully broken love story with Adam Sandler in possibly his best role. Then, in “There Will Be Blood” (2007), Anderson unleashed Daniel Day-Lewis on audiences as Daniel Plainview, creating a tense, terrifying meditation on power and ambition among the oil fields of the early 20th century.

“The Master” follows the story of Navy veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) just after the second world war. When we first meet Freddie, he’s mixing up some kind of potent alcoholic brew in a coconut, then he’s humping a sand-sculpture mermaid on the beach, and then he jacks off into the sea. That’s Freddie in a nutshell, some kind of rough, odd, oversexed hooch alchemist, and postwar America is sometimes a bit tame for him.

When one of his strange drinks kills a man, Freddie seems to be running out of options, as well as just plain running. He stows away on a boat, and is found by “The Master” (Philip Seymour Hoffman). They form a bond immediately, though the nature of that bond is pretty darn unclear. The Master is the leader of The Cause, a cult or group based around The Master’s writings which involve a lot of incoherent nonsense about past lives, returning to a perfect state, and changing one’s perceptions of reality (based to some degree on Scientology).

Freddie tags along as The Master and his entourage are chased out of first New York, then Pennsylvania. The Master is dogged by unbelievers, allegations of financial fraud, and the inconsistencies in his own teachings, but he (mostly) holds it all together through sheer charisma, the sound of his own voice and the strength of his performance — the character’s performance as he speaks to his devoted followers, but also Hoffman’s performance, which is fantastic. Both Hoffman and Phoenix are fascinating to watch, mesmerizing even, even if little of what they say or do makes much sense.

And there’s the rub. It’s easy to see why Paul Thomas Anderson was drawn to the notion of the character of The Master, a man proficient in a variety of fields, a visionary who understands how to hold the attention of an audience and speak to them on a fundamental, emotional level, even if what he’s saying doesn’t actually add up to anything, a bit of a magician who can keep you glancing past the strings he’s pulling... because that’s Paul Thomas Anderson. Remember the ending of “Magnolia”? Didn’t make a lick of sense. People either love it or hate it; if they hate it, it’s because it didn’t make sense, but if they love it, it’s because it felt like art.

Everything Anderson does feels like art, but “The Master” goes too far. Beautifully shot, ardently acted and with a precise and driving score, it is, nonetheless, a movie which is very actively saying nothing, just scene after scene of characters spewing lines of nonsense—literally nonsense, since The Master and his followers are always discussing his fictional philosophy which isn’t even coherent within the world of the film—filmed with care and then edited together moment by moment according to some sequence that probably felt good at the time.

It’s hard to imagine this is accidental, or unconscious on Anderson’s part; surely he meant to do this, to string together these luminous scenes and say, “Meaning? That’s not my responsibility, that’s yours—go ahead, fill it in for me, just like The Master’s followers, because I am really that great.” It’s also hard to forget that the opening scene is about masturbation.

That’s fair enough as an artistic statement, but, well... it’s no fun to watch.