Review: Boogie Nights (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson's second film is a fascinating, intentionally sprawling examination of the lives of those sucked into the California porn industry in the late 1970s through the early 1980s, and not only provides a unique lens in which to view the time period, also manages to humanize these characters, while still highlighting the exploitative and demeaning elements of the industry, coupled with the allure of stardom and fame that it promises.

Anderson's direction is dizzyingly unique, with an endless series of complex tracking shots and panning shots woven together in what feels like a fever dream. His camera feels uniquely alive and inspired, and it helps immerse the audience in the world, particularly the mind boggling opening shot, which goes on for at least three and a half minutes and introduces almost every major character in the story. His screenplay, which tackles at least three major plots and a dozen subplots, is also excellent, balancing and interweaving all the storylines in a wild swirl of activity that miraculously never leaves the viewer confused.

The performances all are spectacular, from Mark Wahlberg's performance as Dirk Diggler, a well endowed newcomer, to Burt Reynolds as the charismatic master exploiter Jack Horner, to Julianne Moore as Amber Waves, the mother figure to Dirk, to an ocean of recognizable supporting players such as William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Don Cheadle, and John C. Reilly, all of whom own their parts. In doing so, they all humanize characters that could have easily felt like stereotypes, and while the film doesn't for a second glamorize or shy away from the exploiting, debauched and perverted way of the porn industry, it's main goal is to simply show the people who, either by choice or circumstance, found themselves here, and how they're still humans.

Robert Elswit's high-contrast cinematography perfectly invokes the neon sun drenched world of Southern California in the 70s and 80s, and is full of wonderful color and vigor.

The use of music, an veritable ocean of disco, funk, rock, and pop from that era is equally inspired, with Anderson doing a beautiful job at contrasting the drug addled, sexually exploitive world with the music that sprang from it.

Of course, being a film about the porn industry, it has to show sex, and boy is there a lot, almost to a point of over exposure. Granted, most of the sex is only seen via clips from the in-universe porn they're making, and given that Anderson seems to deliberately contrast Reynolds' self righteous belief that porn is art with the sheer base depravity of the films he actually makes, it makes sense that the sex would feel gross and tacky to the extreme. But for me, the film was always a bit more effective when we DIDN'T see the sex on screen, as it gave us time to develop the characters better when we stayed away from the sex.

But even so, it was still a good film, and one gets the sense that Anderson isn't condoning porn at all here. It's simply a method for him to explore the characters, and the era of his story. The consequences of their debauched lives do come back to haunt the characters, and if one does a quick glance at the time at which the film ends, it cuts off immediately before HIV/AIDS broke out, which pretty much destroyed the industry as it was at the time, giving the ending of the film, in which everyone seems to be back on their feet and ready to tackle the future, a melancholic feel as if all these people are doomed by the looming storm of the virus.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

But yeah, there you go. I thought the film was a fascinating character study, but be warned that this has lots of sex.

5 out of 5