Boogie Nights 5 stars
A few months ago, I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest movie, One Battle After Another, and realized I had seen almost all of his movies. One that I missed was Boogie Nights from 1997, his second film and arguably one of his best. It follows several characters involved in the porn movie industry starting in 1977 through 1983 and shows each as having very human qualities, including their faults and how they have dreams for the future. Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds in one of his best performances) is the director who makes his films at his luxury home (where he also has large pool parties for his guests). He has a following of several “actors” and crew who he employs, but one is special. That is a young kid named Eddie (Mark Wahlberg in one of his early roles) who Jack discovered at a nightclub and decides to give him an audition. Jack discovers that Eddie has a special “talent” that is valuable in porn films and soon Eddie is starring in several movies where he comes to be known as Dirk Diggler. This is at a time when the movies are still shot on film and are shown mainly in theaters. Jack has a dream that his movies should evolve into an art form where people actually stay for the story. What he doesn’t realize is that a revolution is coming called videotape that will result in most films being watched at home. In reality the action scenes look like they belong in bad B-movies. If you have seen it then you know that Boogie Nights doesn’t really look like a porn movie as the sex scenes have a business-like quality to them and much of what we see are the behind-the-scenes aspects of filmmaking. (The film avoided getting an NC-17 rating.) Besides Jack and Dirk Diggler, the film focuses on a wide variety of characters, showing the role of each and their hopes for success. But about an hour into the movie things fall apart for each one as they get lost in a world of crime and drugs. They include Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) a former housewife who has lost custody of her child, Rollergirl (Heather Graham) who always wears her roller skates, Reed (John C. Reilly) who has a crush on Dirk, Scotty (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is especially lacking in confidence, Buck (Don Cheadle) who dreams of owning his own wi-fi business, club manager Rodriguez (Luis Guzman), Little Bill (William H. Macy), the assistant director, whose wife likes to have sex with every man in the business and Kurt (Ricky Jay) the cameraman. The lives of each one spiral downward into chaos with only some of them making a recovery. Dirk in particular hits rock bottom after he gets a very inflated idea of his own stardom. In one notable scene he and two of his friends try to take advantage of a playboy in a drug deal that takes a turn for the worse. Anderson catches the feel of the seventies and early eighties with his attention to detail in the sets and the wardrobe. He adds to the atmosphere with the wide range of music from the period. Like his other films, Anderson makes Boogie Nights all about the human qualities of his characters. This is one that I’m sorry I missed when it came out as it created quite a splash at the time for Anderson as well as for Burt Reynolds. I also recommend you check out some of Paul Thomas Anderson’s other notable films that include Magnolia, There Will Be Blood and Inherent Vice.
