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
