Z At The Movies 10.30.02: Boogie Nights Posted by Jacob Ziegler on 10.30.2002
Since I saw Punch-Drunk Love this weekend, it seemed like a good time to go back and visit the movie that made director Paul Thomas Anderson a player in Hollywood.
Z At the Movies: Boogie Nights
Boogie Nights is an amazing film for so many reasons. The writing is creative and original. The actors are nothing short of brilliant. The cinematography is perfectly suited to each scene, and the set design is impeccable for the late 70’s and early 80’s. But the most amazing aspect of this film is its central focus. Take all of the wonderful things I said about Nights, and then realize that the film is, essentially, about one man’s ridiculously large reproductive organ.
That large organ belongs to an eighteen-year-old named Eddie, played astoundingly by Mark Whalberg. When adult filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds, in what should have been an academy award-winning performance) discovers Eddie, he convinces him to become part of his movies, and both hit superstardom. That is of course, after Eddie changes his name to Dirk Diggler.
Despite that very brief and simple plot outline, Nights is a tremendously complex film with many pathetic characters that I could not help but care about. Julianne Moore (Magnolia, The End of the Affair) plays Amber Waves, Jack’s favorite woman, and star of many of his films. Despite having sex with Dirk on numerous occasions, she still plays a very matriarchal character, and the tenderness she is capable of is beautiful cinema. She also plays mother to Rollergirl, played by Heather Graham (Swingers, Bowfinger), another one of Jack’s stars. William H. Macy (Fargo) plays Bill, a crewmember, whose life is endlessly dumped on, especially by his wife, who seems to have sex with everyone but him. Don Cheadle (Devil in a Blue Dress) is Buck, a stereo salesman who turns away all his potential buyers by playing country music. The brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Scotty, another crew member, who is blatantly homosexual and mentally challenged, and I got the feeling that Jack only let him work on the movies because he feels sorry for him. Rounding out the cast is Diggler’s best friend Reed Rothchild, played by the wonderful John C. Reilly (Magnolia, Hard Eight,). The relationship between Reed and Dirk is one of the few constants in the film, and the sense of camaraderie Whalberg and Reilly project is very powerful. Also part of the cast are several of Anderson’s regulars, including Luis Guzman, Philip Baker Hall, Ricky Jay, Alfred Molina and Melora Walters.
Boogie Nights is very effective largely due to its structure. The opening is the introduction to the characters. The next section is the “happy portion,” in which everything is going great, until one big catastrophic event that sends everyone into a downward spiral. After that event, the whole world seems to crash down on each of the characters, before everything is resolved by the time the credits roll. This seemingly basic formula becomes anything but in the hands of a brilliant auteur like Anderson. His dialogue, pace and cinematography keep the film moving at a rapid pace for its almost three hours. The true greatness of Boogie Nights comes in its ability to make us laugh, cringe, squirm, and focus our eyes on what happens to a bunch of porn stars, drug dealers/users, pedophiles, and adulterers. That is a difficult thing, to make people care about people they should not really care about, but P.T. Anderson pulls it off admirably.
Check for Boogie Nights in the drama section of your local Blockbuster, and happy viewings!
