But this is not just Eddie's story nor is it just about pornography. Buck tries to develop the audio retail side of his working life but no one at the sound system shop buys him as a black cowboy. Amber comes across as maternal to the younger ones on the set but has lost contact with her real child. Her surrogate daughter Rollergirl can't finish high school because, like most people, she finds it oppressive and, unlike most of her fellow students, already has a couple of decent incomes. Club owner Maurice thinks he has a shot at porn stardom. Reed is a walking case of Dunning Kruger syndrome. People don't even bother to wait until he turns his back before laughing at him. Little Bill's wife won't stop shagging other guys at every party they go to. And at the centre of everything in this mini cosmos is Jack Horner who believes he can raise porn to an art that will be warmed by the embrace of a mainstream that will legitimise his life. In short, everyone in this movie is headed for disaster.
This is not Paul Thomas Anderson's first feature. That was Hard Eight and you had to hunt it down online if you wanted to see it. When Boogie Nights hit it looked like the resurrection of Robert Altman as new Bible sized epics of Americana kept turning up with the Anderson by line. From this one on, Anderson developed into a brand and cinephiles had another auteur to wait on. The good news there is that most of it is worth the wait.
At the time, the twenty-eight year old was proving adept at presenting a large canvas with a long running time but insisting on its accessibility. Seeing it again, I was struck, having seen most of the more recent PTA titles, how much of a young film maker's film this is. While Anderson can be forgiven for not predicting the stigma-free normalisation of pornography in daily life, his jabs at the stilted acting of porn movies, the crassness of the players in their lives offset ("imported Italian nylon shirts" FFS) or Jack's self-embarrassing monologue about making "real" cinema, come across as cheap shots rather than warmth: too much of the reporting has the young person's judgement about it. That has not survived Boogie Nights in Anderson's career since. The next film Magnolia, while overlong, addresses this and you can almost feel the scouring pad going over the screenplay to present something more mature and accomplished (it ended up being weighed down by self-importance but it really wasn't jusdgey).
But Boogie Nights is far more than a string of easy digs. The various character threads tell solid tales and Anderson's handling of the phase during which we see the consequences of hubris, neglect or decadence weave together in a montage of personal failure that manages to elicit more pity than disapproval, remains entertaining in a way that similar passages by the likes of Oliver Stone never did, and never quite feel like transitory montages. Having established with long takes, deft stitching at the seams through well timed entrances, needle drop music choices or scaled down cataclysms, we are ready to take the many moments of plummeting fortune, self-subversion and falls into perdition as easily as the more conventionally staged scenes. If we chortled at Eddie telling how he settled on the screen name Dirk Diggler we aren't so much as smirking when his jealous dummy spit gets him fired on the spot and cast into the wasteland. Amber and Rollergirl's coked up rhapsody about motherhood is just the next stop on the line of her losing all association with her offscreen son. The stunt in the back of the limo with the old classmate and Rollergirl is, for all its wincing awkwardness, manages to be heart rending. There are too many moments like this to list but you get the idea.
The cast is an astute blend of old guard, contemporary indie darlings and figures of future achievement. Who better than Burt Reynolds with his stapled back face work and history of popular mainstream stud roles to embody the whack movie maker who thinks he's making modern classics. Newcomer to the screen Mark Wahlberg takes us from a believably humble young 'un through to the ravaged vet that a very few years at the top of the porn heap have made him. Celebrated character star to be Phillip Seymour Hoffman makes us ache with his cod out of water pathos in a performance of great courage. Ditto William H. Macy who had weasled his way out of our hearts in the Coens' Fargo only a few years before, gives us someone too long suffering to go on but also too pride-blinded to step away. Julianne Moore continued to prove she could do anything. Don Cheadle's socially offensive anti-stereotype is a coagulating mass of restrained fury. Again, too much to list; a great cast delivering good writing and performance.
The '90s were the decade of resurrected auteurist flexes. From Scorsese's epic tracking shot scenes in Goodfellas to Tarantino's callbacks to '70s timeline reshuffles and sourced pop songs, to Oliver Stone's mix 'n' match mega student films, it was a time of dazzle. Little wonder that a return to bare bones with 1999's The Blair Witch Project was such a global hit (it wasn't just innovative marketing). Boogie Nights with its restless camera motion and sexy editing was, by decade's end, barely noticeable as a style showcase. It looks a lot fresher now that comparable mainstream movies are presenting comparably calmer surfaces. Then again, after the more bloated Magnolia, and post 911, Anderson's tale of damaged people Punch Drunk Love, came in at a more modest ninety-five minutes and followed a linear path from opening to closing credits.
As a sophomore effort Boogie Nights dazzles because it's meant to dazzle. Everything that he could have done to announce himself the way Orson Welles did with his own feature debut while, also, a young adult, all of it was done, put on the screen in a vehicle designed for notoriety by its subject matter alone. Now, its self-avowed period status, being already a retrospective story, feels even more solid. Yes, it's easy to stretch it a little to apply to Hollywood (where it actually seems better off for the comparison) but that it can be left as a story from the golden era of pornography is testament to its strengths as any kind of film. Anderson was serious about this and ensured that no mistake could be made about his coda scene's celebration of family values.
It's not a moment of winking irony, it's earnest. It's delivered in the same kind of impressive single take as the one by which we entered as Jack Horner almost gives the audience a guided tour of an evening in with the extended family as the cooking and the prepping and the rehearsals go on. And the last word is given to the object we've only heard about all through as Dirk Diggler perfects his line reading before pulling it out for the mirror and us. Then it's put back. He zips up and makes a few ersatz karate moves and exits. And as we watch the fade to black turn into the end credits and have to endure ELO singing Living Thing is anyone bothering to ask as they did in 1998 if we've just seen a massive prosthetic or if that was the real thing. We're possibly wiser to movie magic now with the development of cinematic television but I wonder how much of that is only by assumption and we ask or studiously omit asking the question lest we should appear crass or, worse, naïve. After two hours and more of Boogie Nights the dilemma of it is fun.
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