I can recall gendering at the beautiful one-sheet for Paul Thomas Anderson's breakthrough movie months before it was released in the fall of 1997. I marveled at its huge cast, and was excited about the subject matter--a trip through the Los Angeles porn industry of the late 70s/early 80s. I didn’t know who Anderson was at that time, having not seen his first feature, the small-time con film Hard Eight, but that would soon change. The Boogie Nights poster, though, with its intricate photo collage of characters from the film, promised an epic portrayal unlike anything ever attempted. I was extremely thrilled about seeing it.
Eddie’s eventual transformation into the XXX-star Dirk Diggler is followed in great detail, but this story is really a kind of connective tissue for all the many other tales the film has to offer: Julianne Moore is a top-tier porn actress battling the courts and her ex-husband (John Doe) over custody of their son while using Horner’s coterie of performers as sort of stand-in children; William H. Macy is a meek assistant director struggling with his wife (porn queen Nina Hartley) and her hurtful infidelity; John C. Reilly is an amiable second-string performer (with a penchant for magic tricks) attempting to forge a stronger identity for himself; Don Cheadle is another beaten-down porn star who’s finding his race as a barrier to breaking into the world of stereo sales; Heather Graham is the sexy but largely innocent Rollergirl, searching for the family she can’t find at home.
And Horner himself is battling pressures to convert to video rather than film--an idea he finds abhorrent (this is especially poignant now, seeing as how 35mm is dying right before our eyes, and Anderson is on the front lines in keeping film alive). Throw into this mix Philip Seymour Hoffman as a schlubby sound guy, Luis Guzman as an enthusiastic outsider, Robert Ridgely as a troubled producer (he has a great scene at his downfall, and the movie is dedicated to him, as Ridgely died soon after production), Philip Baker Hall as an imposing moneyman (you have to love Anderson for resurrecting Hall's career), and Ricky Jay as Horner’s loyal photographer/editor, and you can get a sense of this film’s monumental ambition.
I find many facets of Boogie Nights to be quite wonderful. The widescreen cinematography, by Anderson regular Robert Elswit (who would go on to win an Oscar for his work on Anderson’s There Will Be Blood) is always vibrant and inventive, as is the diverse '70s-era source music score (pairing nicely with a sad circus-flavored underscore by Michael Penn). Anderson’s writes dialogue for dumb people particularly brilliantly, so there’s always funny conversation ensuing. The period detail in the garish art direction (by Bob Ziembicki) and costume design (by Mark Bridges, who's gone on to do The Fighter and The Artist) are spot-on. I love seeing Burt Reynolds tearing into a meaty role again and Julianne Moore is beautifully histrionic here, as she would be in Anderson’s Magnolia as well (both she and Reynolds received supporting Oscar nominations). As always, I find John C. Reilly to be a hoot as Reed Rothschild, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman is sweetly doofy as the crewman who gets a crush on Eddie (his tortured confession of this to the unsuspecting Wahlberg is, I think, the movie’s most shattering scene).
But I also find that many parts don’t work: William H. Macy is a shamelessly barely-sketched punching bag of a character; Don Cheadle’s story fails to make a deep impression (note: any time you see a character in a white suit doing something as innocuous as buying donuts, you can bet that suit’s gonna be covered in blood by the end of the scene); and Graham’s Rollergirl, while extremely cute, also seems thinly-written. It feels like Anderson just has too much movie here for 2½ hours to hold (as wonderful as it is on the wide screen Boogie Nights would have been, storywise, a much more effective TV series). Also, the film owes a bit too much to the Goodfellas style of soaring-then-crashing storytelling (with the onslaught of the '80s being the rather too-obvious turning point, though thankfully the AIDS virus doesn't even make a cameo appearance, though it obviously looms in the world's future). I know that this sort of structure is an old trope that dates back to silent pictures, but that's kind of why it feels too pat, too easy for a filmmaker like Anderson (who's clearly shown in his subsequent work how complex a storyteller he can be). However, there's no crime in being young, and Boogie Nights feels like a young artist's playground.
Nevertheless, it is required viewing, if only for its extremely tense final third, which finds Eddie struggling with a cocaine addiction while trying to launch a hilariously ill-conceived musical career (the songs, performed bravely and horribly by Wahlberg and Reilly, include the original “Feel My Heat“ and an excruciating cover of "The Touch," the closing song to The Transformers Movie). Particularly memorable in this segment, too, is one of the great scenes in movie history, where a destitute Wahlberg, Reilly and ne’er-do-well Thomas Jane are stuck inside a free-basing coke-dealer’s house. The gun-toting dealer is played with maniacal energy by Alfred Molina; he’s so coked up, he has well-hidden suspicions that these three desperate guys are planning to rip him off. With firecracker’s being thrown left and right by his houseboy, he holds the guys semi-hostage as he insists on playing “Jessie’s Girl” and “Sister Christian” for them on his stereo. You’ll never hear these two songs in quite the same way again. It’s really a marvelously scary moment that puts you right there in this mess and gets your heart pounding like you've been smoking crack alongside Molina.
There are many other things I like about the movie: the note-perfect, stiffly-acted porn sequences, shot on a scratchy 16mm; the famously dazzling tour through one of Horner’s house parties, done in one long shot that recalls a scene out of Kalatozov's I Am Cuba, where we eventually follow a girl as she jumps into the pool out back, all to the perfectly-chosen tune of Eric Burdon and War’s “Spill the Wine”; and the final shot of the film, which recalls another Scorsese classic, Raging Bull, but which ends with, at last, a glimpse of what made Dirk Diggler famous. Most centrally, I wish Boogie Nights as a whole was as good as these individual elements. It stumbles in its enthusiasm, but it’s got moxie, ambition, and know-how; often overpraised, it remains an important film if only as the breakthrough for an electrifying artist like Paul Thomas Anderson who, with each passing work, only seems to be getting more and more challenging.
1 comment:
I think the film is a bit more successful all over than you, though I would absolutely, one hundred percent agree with all your criticisms. What makes it hold together as an entire solid thing is Anderson's inventive idea of taking The Celeb Bio Pic, telling the familiar story of a dreamy-eyed kid who is discovered at the drug-store, quickly rises to the peak of fame then promptly falls from grace. He sends the fantasy up by showing the tawdry underside of what a pathetic dream it is by setting it in a gross parallel porn world--it's funny too that this film should treat hetero porn as if the main attraction were the male stars! What's so striking and startling about the effect of the film is that as you fall into the rhythm of its crass parody structure you find yourself truly shocked at how much sympathy you wind up feeling for a character like Julianne Moore's--the scene where she loses custody of her child is shattering. The problem is that the later Anderson doesn't have this satirical layering and so he plays his soap opera straight; in a movie like Magnolia his interconnective themes curdle into predictable corniness; There Will Be Blood dwindles to a kind of phony psycho-drama. The sudden eruptions of violence, say in the cross-cutting between Mark Walhberg's character's being gay-bashed and Rollergirl smashing the smug john who had insulted her in high school years before, seems a forced climax in which the two things don't really fit together because they're not equivalent--these violent Scorcese-esque and Tarantino-y explosions have now become Anderson's fallback means of bringing his stories to a head, while they actually express very little. And the scene where Cheadle gets the money to start his business with the lucky coincidence of the bakery's robbery was to become the annoying structure of cosmic justice effected by the silly rain of frogs sequences in Magnolia. Because of Celeb bio quotation marks in Boogie Nights it works, but in Magnolia it's simply sentimental on an absurd level. Clearly he's stretching to find a great vision of the world, but what we're seeing most of the time is just the stretching and not the world. Therefore Boogie Nights, in my opinion, is his most satisfying, most fully integrated work, a real classic. Oddly, even though he says he was influenced by Scorcese and Altman to me the swishing skating style of the film has always put me more in mind of De Palma, maybe because of Body Double and De Palma's themes of exploitation and his use of sleazy parody and exuberant tackiness.
Post a Comment