The Master (2012 film)

The Master is a 2012 American drama film written, directed, and coproduced by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. It tells the story of Freddie Quell Phoenix, a World War II veteran struggling to adjust to a postwar society, who meets Lancaster Dodd Hoffman, a leader of a religious movement known as The Cause. Dodd sees something in Quell and accepts him into the movement. Freddie takes a liking to The Cause and begins traveling with Dodd along the East Coast to spread the teachings.

Freddie Quell is a sexobsessed alcoholic World War II veteran from Lynn, Massachusetts, struggling to adjust to postwar society. He becomes a portrait photographer at a department store but is soon fired for getting into a drunken fight with a customer. Freddie then finds work at a Salinas, California cabbage farm, but his moonshine poisons one of the elderly Filipino migrant workers and he is chased off.One night, intoxicated, Freddie finds himself in San Francisco and stows away on the yacht of a follower of Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a philosophical movement known as The Cause. When he is discovered, Dodd describes Freddie as aberrated and invites him to stay and attend the marriage of Dodds daughter, Elizabeth, as long as he will make more of his mysterious brew made with paint thinner, which Dodd has developed a taste for. Dodd begins an exercise with Freddie called Processing, a flurry of disturbing psychological questions aimed at conquering Freddies past traumas. Freddie reveals that his father is dead, his mother is institutionalized, he had an incestuous relationship with his aunt, and he abandoned the love of his life, a young girl named Doris, who wrote to him while he was at war. Freddie is enthralled by Dodd, who doesnt flinch from his abject revelations, and Dodd sees something in Freddie. Freddie travels with Dodds family as they spread the teachings of The Cause along the East Coast. Dodd and his family, with Freddie tagging along, stay as guests in the homes of various women drawn to The Cause. But when at a dinner party in New York, a man questions Dodds methods and statements, Freddie pursues him to his apartment and assaults him that night. ........

Source: Wikipedia