I Know Your Anger. I Know Your Dreams.

The Master (Anderson, 2012)

Growing up I remember that every so often in English class we would do a unit on speeches. Generally it was tied in with Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have A Dream Speech," though there were others that tended to be used as well. Actually when I was student teaching and even when I was co-teaching I used speeches as a focal point of lessons. These master orators have, even before the technology existed to record what was being said, had their words preserved for generations to heed. Somewhere, buried beneath these moments in time, is a theoretical common spring of humanity that allows them to remain relevant. But is this timelessness locatable? Is it even true?

If you read my most recent Top 97, you would notice that sitting atop that list is Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 masterpiece There Will Be Blood. As such, it was with great anticipation that I approached The Master, a fictional re-imagining of the Scientology movement coupled with the journey of a returned WWII veteran who finds himself wrapped up in this movement's early days. But, as tends to be the case with Paul Thomas Anderson's films, it's rarely just about what's on the surface.