Boogie Nights: A family in the arts
My first movie for 2011: Boogie Nights, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, and one of the greatest ensembles ever. A spectacular way to begin a new year of movie-watching.
I hadn’t seen it in years but remember it fondly—as a serious movie. I saw it again on New Year’s Day, and it’s HILARIOUS!
This is a story of family and art set in the San Fernando Valley, California in the late 70s and early 80s. Except that the family members are not genetically related to each other, and the art happens to be porn movies. Boogie Nights is Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature film, but he has the confidence and smarts of a veteran. Pure chutzpah. True, having a cast that includes Moore, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ricky Jay, Heather Graham, Luis Guzman, Don Cheadle helps. The “Martin Scorsese, I can do that too” tracking shots are still impressive, and the recreation of the period so authentic I can feel the braids coming out of my head and smell the horrible colognes of the era, Brut and Jovan.
The pornographers believe that they are making art and the earnestness of their pronouncements (“This is real Italian nylon imported from Italy”) produces the most deadpan comedy. In their world Dirk Diggler is an artist whose talent happens to be fucking. But even as you’re choking with laughter at their delusions, you never get the feeling that PT Anderson is laughing at them. He loves these people—the porn star who loses custody of her kid and becomes a mother to her costars, the black actor forever searching for the right look, the porn director who warns that video will cheapen their art. And we, the audience, care about them.
Anderson excels at scenes that combine the funny and the horrible: Philip Seymour Hoffman’s clueless gay grip trying to kiss Dirk; Dirk and Reed attempting to be rock stars (with a horrific version of the theme from the Transformers cartoon); William H. Macy’s cuckold who keeps walking in on his wife having sex with other men, many other men; Don Cheadle getting caught in a doughnut shop during a robbery.
The action gets more frantic in the coked-up 80s, culminating in that mad sequence. The one where Wahlberg, Reilly and Thomas Jane are selling cocaine to Alfred Molina who’s conducting Sister Christian by Night Ranger (then singing Jessie’s Girl) in his underwear while his Asian boytoy is exploding firecrackers. At the height of the insanity the camera stays on Wahlberg’s face for a full minute and his expression—coked-up, paranoid, nervous and stupid—sums up the era. Brilliant.
The closing montage set to God Only Knows by the Beach Boys, which ends with us beholding the “special thing” we had only seen through the stunned expressions of Dirk’s costars: perfection.
I love you, Paul Thomas Anderson.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 4th, 2011 at 05:56
I rewatched Magnolia and There Will Be Blood over the holidays. I can’t wait for his next movie. It’s supposed to star Philip Seymour Hoffman. Will definitely watch Boogie Nights again some time this month. :D
January 4th, 2011 at 13:57
This movie is epic.
PTA is a good way to start the year especially with news of dead blackbirds falling out of the sky in Arkansas. Different taxonomic class altogether but it’s Magnolia you want to watch when you hear about something like that.
January 4th, 2011 at 14:45
One of my favorite films ever. Saw it last month again also. I like the humor of that scene where William H. Macy says he can’t concentrate on the photography of the scene they’re shooting because his wife is being f*cked in the poolside, and we the audience can’t also focus on the conversation because the scene frames the f*cking scene with his wife in the center of both Macy and the other guy.
January 5th, 2011 at 08:46
I think that’s why I liked Boogie Nights. I remember watching it at an art-house theater in Oklahoma (they have one of those out there!). It was one of the films where I was thankful to have to view with like-minded individuals. They laughed at all the right spots and gasped in horror at the right sequences as well.
In the end, even if the characters seemed shallow and dimwitted, you felt for them. They didn’t know anything better and they only relied on each other to survive. PT Anderson sure knows how to bring the beauty out of abysmal sadness (another example of that is Tom Cruise at his best in Magnolia when he finally makes amends with his dying father). Oh, and many a comedy has tried to replicate that Alfred Molina scene. The one which draws inspiration from the Wonderland murders.