Boogie Nights (1997)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights is a young filmmaker’s film in the best sense of the phrase: caution is totally thrown to the wind, but it’s thrown to the wind by someone with a clue as to where the wind might actually take it. The film is stuffed with incident, but everything feels strangely essential. This is the kind of movie that inspires critics (or maybe just me) to pile on the adjectives: funny, exuberant, depressing, original, derivative, insane, stupid, sentimental, and, for a picture set on the fringes of the porn industry, surprisingly chaste. Boogie Nights was the film of 1997. And it was also one of the films of the 1990s.
If Hard Eight saw Anderson using the noir as a platform for something more personal, then Boogie Nights sees him riffing on a rise and fall structure normally reserved for gangster pictures. We know the groundwork for this kind of film by heart: we open with a desperate or ambitious hero, the hero discovers a talent that doesn’t really jive with polite society, the hero emerges a major success on the strength of said talent, the hero crashes in a rage of gluttony and ego.
Anderson uses this structure to tackle the rise and fall of the porn industry, but he’s about as interested in that as he is the duel between religion and oil that drives There Will Be Blood. Boogie Nights, like Hard Eight, like everything else in the Anderson filmography, is concerned with the rise and fall of family. In the case of Boogie Nights, it’s a surrogate family that lives in and around the porn industry, which here functions as a sort of island of lost toys. The characters that populate the film’s universe may be the single greatest achievement of Boogie Nights. They are gripping and unpredictable, broad and soap-operatic, but still jarringly human, succumbing to weakness at the most inopportune times. You feel like anything can happen, and Anderson is masterful with tone: a comedic subplot can turn fatally serious on a dime and a subplot that you’re just sure is going to shit can suddenly blossom into something hopeful and romantic.
The result is a coked up, feverish Altman picture only cut with a visual style that leans on Scorsese and early De Palma and laced with a flakey humor that’s purely Anderson. Anderson doesn’t try to hide his influences either; the justifiably praised opening scene of Boogie Nights practically shouts them from the rafters. The opening, a four or five minute tracking shot from outside the streets into the night club where Eddie works, is a delirious achievement, and very directly, self-consciously, recalls the similar scene in Goodfellas. The scene also has a simpler function: to introduce the audience to as many of the sprawling story’s characters as quickly as possible.
And again, it’s the characters that truly matter here. I’m not going to list them all, I’d be here another thousand words, but two need to be mentioned, Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) and Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), the father and son of Boogie Nights. The juice here comes from canny casting, both are talented actors who tend to not live up to their potential for reasons that I could only speculate. At this point in his career, Wahlberg had been surprisingly terrific in the teeny bopper Fatal Attraction retread Fear, and Boogie Nights was an expansion of that. Eddie Adams is young, imbalanced, vulnerable, and Wahlberg is electric, particularly in a brutal argument with his mother early on that drives the rest of the film. I also like the early scene between Adams and a lover, she praises his cock and he tells her (though he’s really telling himself) that “everyone’s got one thing”. The dialogue is forced here, Anderson strains for poetry a bit, but the scene roots you in Eddie’s damage, and carries you through the darker, more challenging passages of the film.
Reynolds has always been underrated. I know the film is (rightly) praised, but does anyone really talk about the performances in Deliverance? Reynolds imbued that role with more than your usual tough guy stuff, there’s a simmering authority, a rage that’s channeled into sharp humor until really pushed, and then, well then he lets you have it. I’ll never forget the moment in Deliverance where he kills the woodsman with a bow and arrow. Watch the look on Reynolds’ face, the ease with the bow. This guy was BORN for this. Reynolds, after years of Cop and Halfs, got that rage, that humor, that aloof, that pure unchecked male id, back for Boogie Nights. The relationship between Reynolds and Wahlberg, two under thought of actors of opposite generations just going for it, is riveting and poignant. It also informs the moving finale, where the problem child Eddie, having long been known as Dirk, has the reconciliation that he never dared imagine with his actual family.
Ok, let’s list: Don Cheadle. Luis Guzman. Ricky Jay. Alfred Molina. William H. Macy. John C. Reilly. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Philip Baker Hall (he gets the funniest line of the film, watch for it, it involves lollipops). Melora Walters. Thomas Jane. Heather Graham. Julianne Moore. All of the actors are given great, intimate, desperate stories and scenes, and they all knock them out of the stratosphere. Boogie Nights is a beautiful, flawed, undeniably human second movie.
★★★★
Leave a Reply