Monthly Archives: July 2025

  • Boogie Nights

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul Thomas Anderson (1997)

    You can forgive Boogie Nights plenty because its commercial and critical success enabled Paul Thomas Anderson to make Magnolia (1999).  You can understand the earlier film’s impact on its original release and get a sense of what an exciting new talent its twenty-seven-year-old writer-director must have seemed then.  Even so, Boogie Nights now strikes this viewer, returning to it nearly thirty years on, as seriously overrated – and much too long.  At 156 minutes, it is a half-hour shorter than Magnolia but should be much shorter.  It has little of the thematic ambition, narrative range and emotional riches of its successor.  

    Boogie Nights and Magnolia are both set in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, where Anderson grew up.  In Magnolia he introduces a series of apparently unrelated individuals then gradually reveals various connections between them.  In contrast, several of Boogie Nights’ main characters are together in the opening sequences – at a night club, the film’s title location, owned by Maurice Rodriguez (Luis Guzmán).  Those not among the Boogie Nights clientele are soon in evidence, along with the other principals, at a pool party at the home of porn filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds).  He’s a curious kind of paterfamilias whose guests include colleagues working on both sides of the camera.  The performers include leading lady Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), Reed Rothchild (John C Reilly), Becky Barnett (Nicole Ari Parker) and porn starlet Brandy aka Rollergirl (Heather Graham).  (Whatever else Brandy takes off, it’s never her roller skates.)   Among Jack’s crew are assistant director Little Bill Thompson (William H Macy), cameraman Kurt Longjohn (Ricky Jay), and boom operator Scotty J (Philip Seymour Hoffman).  One other character joins the family in the interval between the club and poolside sequences.  High-school dropout Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) is working as a dishwasher in Boogie Nights when he catches Jack Horner’s eye.  Jack follows Eddie back to the kitchen and chats with him there.  ‘It seems to me,’ says Jack, ‘beneath those jeans there’s something wonderful just waiting to get out’.  Eddie, in other words, is not just a pretty face but also blessed with an XL penis.  He soon becomes Dirk Diggler, the new sensation of the porn-movies world and the film’s protagonist.

    The narrative spans the late 1970s and the early 1980s.  It also definitely shifts from one mood to another about halfway through; Jack’s party on New Year’s Eve 1979 marks the dividing line between moods, as well as decades.  In the 1970s story, Anderson is strikingly non-judgmental about porno filmmaking.  In the 1980s, as things go badly wrong for nearly everyone on screen, their falls from grace seem like the wages of sin.  The shift of tone is explained in Anderson’s Sight and Sound (January 1998) interview (the handout for this BFI screening).  He mentions F W Murnau’s Sunrise:  A Song of Two Humans (1927) and Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1985) – other ‘what I call gearshift movies’, both among Anderson’s favourites.  He goes on to say that, when he was still a teenager, he made a short film, The Dirk Diggler Story, which:

    ‘… has some of the same textures [as Boogie Nights], but is much funnier.  It’s my point of view as a 17-year-old, and what was funny to me then was the titles.  As a mass audience, we’re amused and turned on by porno titles … but then this is quickly not funny.  There was something in that short film that was darkly comic, but there were a lot of smartass moments.  Over the course of ten years, just by getting older and slightly sick of it all, that’s where more of the sadness and drama comes into it.  I just sat there and lived with it and it was just not fucking funny anymore.’

    ‘It’ is presumably the screen porn that Anderson watched regularly at the time.  Boogie Nights’ change of tone makes complete sense to the filmmaker, then, but it’s still jarring for the audience.

    Boogie Nights’ porn film titles are funny – so are the characters’ names or screen pseudonyms.  While it soon emerges that Amber Waves is really Maggie something, Eddie, at a very early stage of his career, respectfully but firmly asks Jack Horner always to call him Dirk.  Once that career takes off, Dirk Diggler and Reed Rothchild, his best mate in the company, pitch to Jack and his producer, ‘The Colonel’ James (Robert Ridgely), a sex-and-violence action-movie series, in which Dirk and Reed will star – as Brock Landers and his sidekick Chest Rockwell.  ‘Brock Landers: Angels Live in My Town’ and ‘Brock Landers II: Oral Majesty’ kick off a run of hits.  Even while Anderson’s view of the industry is upbeat, it’s the benign satirical details of Boogie Nights that, along with his cast, make you smile – the crap script and acting as Dirk shoots his first sex scene with Amber, the voiceover rave reviews in the porn-movie press.  The film shares with plenty of its characters a persisting drugs dependency.  Although Anderson occasionally shows the horrific effects of this, he more often sees the comedy of getting stoned.  Plenty of the (mostly young) audience in NFT1 sounded as if they could see it, too.  I couldn’t.

    Two key events occur at the New Year’s Eve 1979 party.  First, Jack receives an unwelcome lecture from wealthy Floyd Gondolli (Philip Baker Hall), a porn impresario who’s been ‘doing theater work in San Francisco and San Diego for as long as you’ve been doing stag and hard-core, Jack’.  He tells Horner their industry’s future lies in shooting on video instead of film stock, and to prepare for a sea change in porn-viewing habits, from watching in cinemas to watching at home on videotapes.  Second, Little Bill Thompson abruptly stops being the butt of a running joke.  His role as Jack’s fusspot sidekick has been less significant than his repeated humiliation watching his nympho wife (Nina Hartley) being screwed by a succession of strange men – first at their home, then on the margins of a film shoot (where the coupling attracts a small crowd), finally in a room at Jack’s party.  This time, Little Bill, once he sees what’s going on, gets a gun from his car.  As other partygoers start the countdown to New Year, he shoots and kills his wife and her latest stud, then puts the revolver in his own mouth and pulls the trigger.

    Floyd Gondolli’s prophecy is soon proved right – Jack Horner, accepting the inevitable, starts working with him – but the VHS revolution is barely relevant to Anderson’s different filmmaking priorities in the second half of Boogie Nights.  Little Bill’s final act presages the violence that dominates the film’s later stages.  Not all the characters’ ordeals involve bloodshed but those that don’t – Amber/Maggie loses a courtroom battle with her ex-husband for custody of their son; the Colonel goes to jail for possession of child pornography – occupy relatively very little screen time.  In the first of several extended grim sequences, Anderson crosscuts between events inside and outside two cars.  Dirk, whose cocaine habit has made him increasingly volatile, gets fired by Jack, falls on hard times and briefly turns to prostitution.  He’s picked up on the street by a young man (Cannon Roe) who drives his Toyota into a parking lot and offers a few dollars to watch Dirk masturbate.  At the same time, Jack Horner sits beside Brandy on the back seat of a limousine, and addresses Kurt Longjohn’s camcorder:

    ‘Welcome to the experiment. … I have with me – a little princess in the world of adult film — the lovely Miss Rollergirl. … We are on the lookout. …We’re just gonna drive on down Ventura [Boulevard] … and see what we find.  Maybe we find some new, young stud who wants to take a shot and get hot and heavy with Rollergirl back here in the limo — and we’ll capture it on video.  This is a first, ladies and gentlemen.  A first in porn history …’

    A college student (Kai Lennox), who appeared early in the film ogling Brandy when they were in the same high-school class, happens to be passing.  Jack stops the limo and invites the student in.  When things don’t work out as planned – the student wants to do his own thing rather than what he’s told by Jack to do – he’s ejected from the car onto the pavement.  Jack repeatedly punches and kicks him while Rollergirl stamps her skates into the boy’s face.  Meanwhile, a truck screeches into the parking lot and three punks jump out.  They haul the passenger from the Toyota, whose driver joins them in beating up Dirk and yelling homophobic abuse at him.

    Elsewhere on Ventura Boulevard, Buck Swope goes into an eatery/store to buy donuts [sic] for his pregnant girlfriend, Jessie (Melora Walters).  Inside the place, a street kid pulls a gun on the young man behind the counter and tells him to open the safe.  Buck, terrified, freezes, while a middle-aged man, sitting at a table alone, watches impassively until he too produces a gun.  He shoots the street kid, who returns fire.  They succeed in killing each other but not before the middle-aged man has fired another shot, wildly enough to hit and kill the store employee.  White-suited, blood-spattered Buck is still paralysed with fear until he notices the wad of notes removed from the safe and now on the floor along with the three fatalities.  A subsequent set piece – which lasts longer than all the other mayhem highlights put together – sees Dirk and Reed, both penniless, accompany Todd Parker (Thomas Jane), another member of the Horner stable, to the home of drug dealer Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina), on a mission to sell him a half-kilo of baking soda disguised as cocaine.  Dirk and Reed want to leave as soon as the cash and the bag of white powder are exchanged but Todd, armed and high on drugs, attempts to steal more money and narcotics from the even more coked-up Rahad.   In the shootout that follows, Todd kills Rahad’s bodyguard and Rahad kills Todd, while Dirk and Reed dodge the bullets and make desperate, separate getaways.

    Dirk makes his way back to Jack Horner’s place and cries on his old mentor’s shoulder – a moment of reconciliation that heralds the film’s relatively upbeat closing scenes.  Magnolia’s finale is similarly hopeful for some of the chief characters but that ending is more confounding, more cheering and feels more earned.  Boogie Nights winds up in 1984.  Jessie gives birth to her and Buck’s son.  Buck, presumably with the help of the money he stole from the donut place, realises his ambition of opening his own stereo equipment store.  Amber shoots a television commercial to mark the store’s opening.  Rollergirl enrols to study for an equivalent to the high-school diploma she failed to get when she walked out of her final exam (to escape the leers of the student she eventually took revenge on).  Reed makes a living doing magic tricks at a strip joint.  Jack, Amber and Dirk prepare to collaborate on another porn venture.  Maurice Rodriguez, with his brothers, opens a new night club.

    In both Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Anderson views nearly everyone sympathetically and sees to it that his fine actors play empathetically.  That’s preferable, of course, to a filmmaker condemning his characters and to actors treating them dismissively or delivering a kind of sardonic commentary.  Yet Anderson’s change of heart about ‘adult’ movies (asked by S&S’s Gavin Smith if he saw ‘contemporary porn as a fallen form’, he replied ‘Pretty much, yeah’) is an issue that he can’t resolve satisfyingly in the second half of Boogie Nights.  Excellent as Mark Wahlberg is, the Dirk Diggler story – as a feature-length story – comes to feel like a standard-issue showbiz biopic tale, of a performer’s rise and fall and qualified recovery.  Jack Horner is an interesting combination – he’s jaded but stubbornly professional – and Burt Reynolds gives a fine performance but Jack’s moviemaking world is an increasingly desolate place.  Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman are both affecting – Hoffman especially so, when the painfully unlovely Scotty J makes a clueless pass at Dirk at the New Year Party then bitterly reproaches himself – but the only enjoyable characters are Buck and Reed.  John C Reilly’s sheer good humour, along with his comic ease and flair, left me always wanting more of Reed, whatever was happening to him.  Don Cheadle is much funnier than I expected but I also liked his character because, from an early stage in the story, Buck seems semi-detached from Jack Horner’s family.  Buck really is passionate about sound systems.  He really does want to promote and sell them, rather than his own physical equipment.

    17 July 2025

  • The World to Come

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mona Fastvold (2020)

    Mona Fastvold is best known as the co-writer with Brady Corbet (her life partner) of the screenplays for his three feature films to date (The Childhood of a Leader (2015), Vox Lux (2018) and The Brutalist (2024)).  Fastvold and Corbet also scripted her debut feature, The Sleepwalker (2014), but neither name is on the writing credits for this, the second film she directed.  The World to Come, written by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, is an adaptation of the latter’s 2017 short story of the same name.  The film’s diary narrative, which I’m guessing replicates Shepard’s original, is one of its big problems.  The World to Come, despite some very good acting, is exasperating.

    In the mid-1850s, in Schoharie County, New York, two married couples are trying to make a living, farming.  It’s a hardscrabble existence, especially for narrator Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and her husband Dyer (Casey Affleck), even though they own their property.  Their neighbour Finney (Christopher Abbott), married to Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) and tenant of ‘the Zebrun farm’, can afford better equipment than Dyer.  The story begins on New Year’s Day 1856, so the start of Abigail’s new diary.  Its entries dominate The World to Come throughout, to soon frustrating effect.  When the diary quotes remarks made or silent reactions perceived, you wish that Fastvold would entrust these to her capable cast; instead, she sometimes reduces the actors to visual-aid supplements to Abigail’s narrative – mouthing words that she tells us were spoken, giving looks that she explains.  We soon learn from what Abigail confides to the diary, and from flashbacks, that she and Dyer recently lost their only child, four-year-old Nellie (Karina Ziana Gerasim), to diphtheria.  While they both miss Nellie badly, Dyer is now ready to try for another baby whereas his wife feels it’s too soon.  But Abigail cheers up, some of the time anyway, once she makes the acquaintance of Tallie.

    At an early stage, Abigail tells Dyer she would like to buy an atlas.  ‘I suppose there are more frivolous purchases one could make,’ he replies.  When she points out that she has ninety cents of her own and can’t imagine how she could better spend the money, Dyer suggests that she could buy her husband a gift.  Her reply is, ‘What better gift could I give him than a wife who is no longer a dullard?’   If Dyer’s remark isn’t meant entirely seriously, Abigail is deadly earnest – ‘My self-education seems the only way to keep my unhappiness from overwhelming me,’ her diary then records.  The atlas announces itself as an object of obvious symbolic importance:  she longs to broaden her limited horizons.  On Abigail’s birthday, in mid-February, Tallie arrives with gifts that include an atlas, making clear that she’ll be her friend’s passport to new realms of experience.  (Dyer, returning from town, produces presents too but they hardly compare – a box of raisins, ‘that needle case you’ve been needing’ and a tin of sardines.  ‘You spoil me,’ is Abigail’s laconic response.)  Within a matter of weeks, the two wives have become lovers.  Tallie’s gift, although not a world atlas, does cover the whole of the United States and will come in useful at the film’s high-summer climax, when she and Finney suddenly and unexpectedly leave the Zebrun farm.  Abigail receives a letter from Tallie in Onandaga County, north of Syracuse, some eighty miles from Schoharie County.  Desperate to see the light of her life again, Abigail sets out, with Dyer, to visit Tallie in her new surroundings.

    The diary’s dominance in The World to Come, designed to compensate for a woman’s lack of voice in the setting of the story, isn’t the script’s only maddening feature.  The characters sometimes say things that make little or no sense in their context.  After giving Abigail her birthday presents, Tallie, in response to Abigail’s asking how Finney is, mentions some of his many dislikeable qualities.  ‘I resolved to visit you so that there would be something in my day other than his meanness,’ says Tallie – but she would surely have visited anyway to give Abigail presents on her birthday?  (She’ll visit again at times when the line about Finney’s ‘meanness’ would be better used.)  Dyer, after handing over his presents, notices Tallie’s – ‘Oh, you got gifts from your new friend’.  ‘She left hours ago,’ Abigail hurriedly replies.  Dyer, who saw Tallie departing just as he arrived home, says so.  Abigail doesn’t dispute this; she says nothing more and nor does Dyer, although he must wonder why his wife told a blatant untruth – he doesn’t at this stage suspect the strength of the women’s mutual attachment.

    He soon does, though.  On a subsequent occasion, Abigail, expecting Tallie, opens the door to Dyer.  ‘Your smile stopped,’ he says, ‘was it meant for someone else?’   Just as he’s leaving the house, Tallie arrives, Dyer observing that ‘the smile returns’.  But Katherine Waterston isn’t smiling, either when Abigail opens the door to Dyer or when she catches sight of Tallie.  It would be easier to accept Dyer’s remarks as perceptiveness – that Abigail is inwardly smiling or unsmiling – if Mona Fastvold didn’t spend rather more screen time showing him as oblivious or indifferent to his wife’s feelings.  For what proves to be their final visit to Tallie and Finney’s for dinner, Abigail buys herself a blue dress very different from her usual plain, neutral-coloured clothes.  Dyer makes no comment on this, even though the dress cost two and a half dollars and he queried Abigail’s spending cents on an atlas.

    At this last supper, the animosity between Tallie and Finney is plain to see – for Abigail, so are marks on her lover’s neck, although Tallie explains them away as caused by a fall.  Deeply worried that she’s not heard from Tallie for a full week, Abigail prevails on Dyer to go with her to the Zebrun farm, which they find deserted, except for a piece of bloodstained cloth.  Abigail wants to call in the local sheriff but Dyer makes enquiries of neighbours, one of whom tells him she saw Finney drive away late one evening – she thinks but isn’t sure that Tallie was seated beside her husband in the cart.  Tallie’s eventual letter, lamenting the conditions of the place where she and Finney now live, does nothing to reassure Abigail, who’s determined to travel to Onandaga County.  Her and Dyer’s arrival at the backwoods house there is another moment in The World to Come that doesn’t add up – Abigail starts yelling at Finney, demanding to see Tallie, as soon as she sees him standing outside the house.  Or, rather, it wouldn’t add up if Fastvold hadn’t inserted in the meantime a short sequence that sees Finney (somehow) kill his wife while they dance together at their new home.  It’s another vexing aspect of Abigail’s diary that, despite its implication that Abigail is telling the entire story, Fastvold includes occasional sequences that don’t involve the protagonist.  This is particularly confusing when there are also bits – notably Abigail’s closing conversation, during which Dyer disappears and the deceased Tallie replaces him on screen and in the conversation – that Abigail must be imagining.  It can’t be, though, that she imagines the dance of death between Tallie and Finney:  distraught Abigail would hardly visualise her beloved’s murder at her husband’s hands in such sinister-lyrical imagery.

    It’s increasingly difficult to get a handle on Dyer’s behaviour in the climactic stages of the story.  He agrees to take Abigail to the Zebrun farm.  After reasonably pointing out that the sheriff won’t investigate a crime when there’s no real evidence that one has been committed, Dyer offers to try and find out more about the circumstances of Finney and Tallie’s departure.  Yet when this fails to pacify Abigail, he ‘tied me to a chair and administered laudanum’.  When, after receiving Tallie’s letter, Abigail still wants to travel to Onandaga County, ‘Dyer refused first to permit my departure’, although he doesn’t try to prevent it.  He then ‘refused to accompany me, and only caught up to the cart at the end of our property and climbed aboard’.  Finney is a comparatively understandable character to the extent that it’s obvious from the start he’s a nasty piece of work.  He gradually emerges as a religious tyrant:  according to Tallie, her husband ‘reads aloud instructions for wives from the Old Testament but when it comes to the Bible, I have to say that there are a lot of passages he may know word for word, but which haven’t touched his heart’.  It’s unclear, however, quite how vicious Finney is meant to be in what he says.  He and Tallie are childless and children, he tells Abigail and Dyer on one of their earlier dinner visits, are ‘a sore point in this household – and yours, I’d expect’.  We don’t know if Tallie has told Finney that their new friends have been but are no longer parents; just as we don’t know, when he later lies to Abigail that Tallie died of diphtheria, if Finney chooses a cause of death that will be especially painful to Abigail because of Nellie.

    Whatever these details are meant to signify, The World to Come skirts a more important question.  We get that there are tensions and antipathies in both marriages, as well as the message that Finney and Dyer, in their different ways, are to blame:  the husbands should be more sympathetic towards, and interested in, their wives.  But Fastvold and her screenwriters – perhaps because they aren’t sufficiently interested in the two male characters – are vague as to how much Dyer and Finney are automatic chauvinists and how much angry cuckolds – or what difference it makes to their injured vanity that their wives are lesbian lovers rather than involved with other men.

    The small cast compels attention, though.  Katherine Waterston’s portrait of Abigail is scrupulously consistent.  That, alas, makes it wearisome too but it’s not Waterston’s fault that her character has so much to say and a predominant mood.  A compensation is that Abigail’s woebegone looks and tone give her plenty of scope to brighten in Tallie’s company.  From the moment Tallie first appears, Vanessa Kirby livens things up.  She has a vocal and gestural freedom, a variety of mood and in the tempo of her line readings, that are very welcome.  Christopher Abbott (who also appeared in The Sleepwalker and is in the cast for Fastvold’s forthcoming third feature, Ann Lee) has a cruder role than any of his three co-stars but he plays it well enough.  ‘It’s been my experience,’ Abigail tells Tallie, ‘that it’s not always those who show the least who actually feel the least’.  While there’s little suggestion that Abigail sees Dyer as an example of this, her words are a good description of Casey Affleck’s acting trademark.  As usual, apparent emotional minimalism – in his voice, face and movement – is very different in its effect:  Affleck is highly expressive.  And there are occasional moments when direction and script are kinder to Dyer – when, for example, he has a fever, which Abigail nurses him through.  When he’s weak, he’s more frankly affectionate than usual.

    If Vanessa Kirby’s Tallie sometimes seems incongruously modern in this mid-nineteenth-century setting, that accords with an important quality of the film as a whole:  its title hints at freedoms of thought and expression for women beyond the time and place of Mona Fastvold’s narrative.  Those freedoms include self-expression in writing, illustrated mainly through Abigail’s diary but also in love poems that Tallie writes to her.  Unfortunately, some of The World to Come’s spoken English is also self-consciously literary – and implausibly so.  The formal language can be witty – as when Abigail, concerned about her husband’s fever, asks Dyer to promise that he won’t die and he replies, ‘That would be the opposite of my intention’.  But when he comes home at the end of a working day to find his wife inactive and no evening meal on the go, it’s hard to understand why, since he’s annoyed, he comes out with the stiff reprimand ‘You haven’t accomplished any of your responsibilities’.  Some exchanges between Abigail and Tallie are even more stilted:  if this is meant to convey how imprisoned the women are in a man’s world, it’s unconvincing.  The film’s sinuous, subtly unpredictable music is a real bonus, though.  It’s by Daniel Blumberg, who would go on to write the Oscar-winning score for The Brutalist.

    11 July 2025

     

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