A film that could have been another Citizen Kane

No doubt about it that Philip Seymour Hoffman improves every movie he's in, and his performance in The Master is terrific, and Joachim Phoenix, as Fred the disciple, is also very good and strange and edge, if had to understand with his mannered, mumbling dialogue - and the movie has some terrific scenes as well: Phoenix's various violent outbursts, always just beneath the surface and expected but terrifying when they occur; and the great "sessions" during which Hoffman interviews Phoenix, in the movie called "processing," but obviously derived from the mysterious "auditing" in Scientology. These sessions are scary and weird and aggressive (the ones where Hoffman interviews the various society lady acolytes are less frightening and just strange and exploitative): in short, there's a lot in this movie and a lot I liked and I wanted to like The Master more, but ultimately it felt flat and cold and in some ways a narrative muddle: aside from the difficulty in following the timeline or the obscurity about how JP got connected with this religious cult in the first place or why Hoffman was so eager to take him into the inner circle - the main problem is that this is a narrative movie with no narrative arc. It seems to want to be a story about a lost man - shell-shocked veteran of WWII - who latches onto a cultish religion and is taken in and changed (or ruined) in some way. Instead, it seems to be scene after scene played at the same level; we do not see JP becoming increasingly devoted or devout; though there are dramatic, climactic moments - the arrest of Hoffman, e.g., they happen and then get brushed away - they do not transform the characters or the story - so in fact there really is no story The sensibilities that the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, establishes when JP and PSH first meet are the same that hold true throughout the movie. It's a film about an idea, a concept - but not about people and their lives and emotions. It could have, probably should have, been about PSH - maybe as scenes through or "told by" JP: sounds like Citizen Kane, right? It had that potential, but rarely rises above the level of Citizen Mundane.