The first thing to notice about movies made in the classic Hollywood studio era, from the twenties through the fifties, is the stillness of the actors—not a static, microphone-bound stand-and-deliver theatricality but a lack of fidgetiness even while in motion, a self-mastery that precludes uncontrolled or incidental gestures. (That’s why moments of true spontaneity, as when Debbie Reynolds smooths her skirt in “Singin’ in the Rain” or Yvonne de Carlo tosses a loose strand of hair from her face in “Criss Cross,” stand out so memorably.)

I don’t know whether the actors’ self-control is just a cinematic convention that directors cultivated in order to lend glances and movements a full measure of dramatic weight, but I doubt it—I suspect that American people of the era really were more tightly controlled, more repressed by the general expectation of public decorum and expressive restraint. Certainly, their clothing and fashion was more restrictive; the girdles, garters, hats, ties, and high-buttoned collars, as well as the helmet-like coiffures of women and men alike seems designed to inhibit sudden, free, and limber movement. And that means it’s so hard to make a movie that’s set in the era of classic movies: even if stylists manage to get the clothing right, actors today—people today—have been raised by and large to let their emotions govern their behavior, and when our actors manage to keep a tight control of their gestures by means of formidable technique, they look like puppets pulling their own strings; the gimmickry shows.

The haunting, utterly inward stillness of the actors in “The Master” is one of the director Paul Thomas Anderson’s most apparent achievements, and it’s no mere ornament or element of dramatic plausibility—it’s at the core of the film, as is the very question of performance as such. I’ve seen the movie twice, which proved important. The first time, I found myself wondering about what it isn’t; the second, I was all the more struck by what it is. It’s not a work of psychological realism but one of extravagantly stirring symbolism masquerading as naturalism, and the first symbols that it sets in motion are the actors themselves.

“The Master” is a grudge match between two styles of performance; the essence of the story is found in the casting of Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell, a traumatized, shell-shocked Navy veteran, and of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, the author and founder of a therapeutic cult, who takes Quell under his wing. Phoenix may have formidable technique but he doesn’t let it show and doesn’t need it; he’s an actor of furious natural emotion, of inner violence with which his very being trembles as he struggles to keep it in check and to channel it. Hoffman, by contrast, is one of the great technicians, an impersonator of genius who harnesses his inner life to his craft in order to infuse the skillful imitations with emotional force.

But Hoffman doesn’t turn up for a while. The movie begins with Quell’s waning days in the service at the end of the Second World War, his mental and spiritual damage coming to the fore as sexual obsession and a taste for the poisonously strong drink that he concocts out of chemicals at hand. And the first thing about Quell that Anderson reveals is the damage his tormented psyche has wrought on his physiognomy. Phoenix has gotten very thin for the role, paring away softness to expose the fractured angles of his cheeks and his bladelike jawbones; with his shoulders hunched, his neck thrown back, and his head tilted down, his eyes seem to look through his very brow, as if he never quite sees what he’s looking at. In closeup (and he’s often in closeup), his right upper lip appears to be paralyzed; it distorts his voice into a quiet, vowel-strewn cry.

The exquisite, obsessive attention to physical detail issues from one of Anderson’s key decisions—to shoot in the large format of 65-mm. film (which is projected in the 70-mm. format), which gives the filmmaker almost four times as much visual information to play with as does the classic 35-mm. stock. He uses it to create an amazingly tactile sense of intimacy, revealing the actors’ razor stubble, their finely combed strands of hair, the grain of their skin, the feel of their clothing, even—by way of a careful control of shadow—the relief and contour of their bodies. Anderson has made the closest thing to a 3-D movie without glasses.

But, remarkably, the filmmaker makes the heavy camera dance, nowhere more gracefully than during Quell’s erotic rapture in the department store, where he works as a portrait photographer, in the presence of a clothing model. And, in that brief role, Fiona Dourif almost steals the film. She glides through the store in a single shot that’s as graceful as it is sexy, an assertively carnal dance of capitalist lust—one that the traumatized Quell can’t make good on any more than he can make money. That sequence is followed by another web-weaving long take, the shot that introduces Dodd, who arrives to have his picture taken. His crisp, effete instantly manner sends Quell into a quiet madness that culminates in them fighting amidst the customers, hurtling furniture and shattered glassware. (Update: James Eckhouse, in a comment below, notes that IMDb credits another actor, W. Earl Brown, with the role of Fighting Businessman. His resemblance, in that role, to Hoffman as Dodd is strong, striking, and, I believe, intentional. It adds a surprising twist—in Quell’s mind, and, I think, in the viewer’s—when Dodd says to Quell (approximately), “Remind me where we’ve met before.”) The entire sequence plays out in a single wondrously choreographed take. Soon thereafter, Quell—following a misadventure at a cabbage farm—runs for his life through the fields (another exhilaratingly gliding shot) and then turns up, by night, at the waterfront. In the movie’s single most exalted moment, the camera follows him and is guided by his gaze to the yacht docked nearby and to the brightly lit festivities onboard. Like a moth to a flame, Quell slips further from view, gliding gracefully toward the dock, and, in the distance, hops with a graceful leap over the railing and into his strange new destiny.

The master of that destiny, the captain of the ship, is, of course, Dodd, who hires the stowaway as his diabolical mixologist and guinea pig. The author and charismatic therapeutic demiurge offers Quell some “processing,” and the drama begins. From the start, what Dodd offers is less like psychoanalysis or hypnosis than it is like acting classes—in particular, like Method acting classes, in which ordinary behavior (saying the name, looking at a partner) is linked to the deepest and most tightly buried personal experiences. Quell, who bears a single trauma (an obsession with a girl back home), loves the feeling of being able to press that wound in his soul and revel in his pain.

Freud understood that the therapeutic project isn’t just the application of a technique but the creation of a relationship in which the symbolic element is as strong as the personal one. Dodd may or may not have read Freud, but he works in the same mode, albeit perverting it to his self-interest. Rather than seeing the transference as a path to treatment, he sees his acolytes’ and patients’ attachment to him as the primary goal of his method. One of the remarkable things about the movie is the light touch with which Anderson evokes Dodd’s demagogy. His followers don’t need much pressure, because Dodd himself is an amazingly alluring presence—his grandiosity is matched by his bonhomie; his heartiness is blended with frenetic, inventive, whimsical energy.

Hoffman brilliantly and astonishingly plays Dodd as Charles Foster Kane; his channelling of Orson Welles’s performance is as eerie as it is exhilarating. The grandiloquent master-builder is also a splendid curator of his personal attributes—the closeups of Hoffman, with his rigidly separated strands of hair, his unyieldingly bright and clear gaze, his insinuating voice, and his bluff, life-loving, Falstaffian cheeks convey a sense of florid order, of flourishing, overflowing vitality, and his outpouring of dynamically marshalled energy is the current that his followers tap into. He’s a man of miraculous abundance without apparent waste, and his demagogic creation, like Kane’s, begins in print: he’s the author of books that his followers study and parse like scripture, and, like Kane, he lives large, his comfort and his generosity reflecting the ostensible bounty of his method.

Quell attaches himself to Dodd, becoming the muscle applied to skeptics in the ranks. A poor man, he lives in luxury in Dodd’s entourage, which is maintained lavishly by donations from wealthy acolytes and held in good running order by Dodd’s wife, Peggy—played by Amy Adams, who shares in the perfect period stillness, holding her head and her gaze fixed as she speaks with a calmly flowing stream of ice-cold thoughts. Yet Quell’s muscle is of limited use to Dodd, who appreciates the devotion it reveals but wants no part of the violence. What Dodd needs, above all, is the devotion itself. He needs to break Quell as a horse trainer would break a stallion, and, submitting him to intense and punitive “processing,” seeking to turn him into a spiritual and psychological dependent.

As the movie’s title suggests, and as a sharp bit of dialogue (reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s 1979 word of caution that “you’re gonna have to serve somebody”) states outright, Anderson is after something bigger than a tale about Scientology: he’s after mastery as such. Quell, a hardened workingman, has never done anything but serve, and he quickly discovers that the service he renders to Dodd is much greater than that of mixology. It’s an extraordinary personal service—the very fact of his fealty and subordination. For he alone, among Dodd’s followers, is a workingman (and Anderson is very sensitive to the matter of class); Dodd depends on the money and the support and the respectability of his middle-class and wealthy followers, but he gets a primal validation from his bond with Quell. At the same time, Quell poses a threat to his realm, because he knows enough to put his own beliefs aside and do a superb impersonation of a believer without ever actually yielding his soul.

Meanwhile, Quell knows which side his bread is buttered on. On first viewing, I thought that Anderson never persuasively showed how Quell, while a cog in Dodd’s machine, was able to put his erotomania aside and remain chaste; on the second viewing, it made perfect sense. First, he’s living in a high style that remains forever foreign to his experience. Second, he luxuriates in the attention that Dodd lavishes on him. Even though Quell doesn’t believe in the method’s most extravagant claims, he enjoys, in a self-tormenting way, the focus on his own trauma. He has a sense that he’s undergoing a sort of medical procedure for the mind, but—unlike Dodd, for whom that procedure is part of a total and totalitarian program—Quell has a sufficiently integral mind to resist control beyond what he can grasp, or what he wants and needs (namely, to face up to his broken romance with the girl back home). Third, there’s something implicitly sexual in the two men’s bond, a subordinated lust in their physical rowdiness. Quell sees through Dodd (sees through him literally, as shown in a remarkable fantasy sequence)—and understands that Dodd’s essential power and motive is vulgarly and satyrically erotic, and, though he neither acknowledges nor yields to any overt attraction, his own sexual energy is utterly diverted to his high-exertion service, like a boxer keeping himself solid for a bout.

The grudge match between the demiurge and the wild man lends even the movie’s most placid moments an extraordinary gravity and moral tension. The stakes are terribly high—one of two mighty men will be broken.

There’s a second problem in making a movie about any characters active in the distant past. History breaks into two parts—pre- and post-1968—and those who came of age in the latter day have an essentially different relationship to power and to its critique. Martial virtues still dominated American in the late forties and fifties (as they did going all the way back to the Homeric age), and adulthood, which came young, was what people aspired to; now, of course, the quest for eternal youth is the desire for a mental and moral youth as well. Our actors are of their time, and can hardly represent the past without investing it with the attitudes of our own day, which is why most new period pieces seem either thin or unintentionally ironic.

Anderson achieves the opacity and emotional impactedness of the time by way of cinematic evocation—Hoffman as Kane, Phoenix as Paul Muni recalling Lon Chaney, Sr. The cinematic archetypes at play—the American workingman in an era of physical labor and total warfare, the tycoon who built an empire with his physical energy—clash as mightily as the characters, and the terrifying sound of their battle resonates in our own therapeutic and abstracted age as the vital resistance of the visceral will of the wounded human animal to the prospect of excessive perfection.

Photograph courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

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