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Review: 'Boogie Nights' steams up the big screen
October 18, 1997
Web posted at: 4:00 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT)From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- Sometimes a truly masterful director can devise a cinematic language that seeps into the work of the legions of filmmakers who follow in his wake.
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This happened with John Ford, who, with "Stagecoach" in 1939, invented the basic visual motifs that inform the Western genre to this very day. In recent years, the director whose work is most often on display in other people's films is Martin Scorsese. Movies like "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull" and "Goodfellas," are visually kinetic enough to have inspired an entire generation of film obsessives.
"Boogie Nights" is an extremely enjoyable movie that contains a couple of magnificent sequences and several fine performances, but director Paul Thomas Anderson (like every other film-head of our shared generation) has been watching lots of Scorsese, and it shows.
I have difficulty praising the film beyond a certain point. Anderson is the real McCoy, there's no doubt about that, but I think the critics should hold on for a little while and give the guy some room to grow. Right now he's got all the chops, but several of them have been lifted off of somebody else's dinner plate.
A tale of porn
The story begins in 1977. Mark Wahlberg (aka "Marky-Mark") plays Eddie, a dimwitted 17-year-old L.A. loser whose only gift in life is (for lack of a classier way of putting it) the size of his penis. He realizes that this impressive trait is his only possible ticket to stardom, so he jumps at the chance to perform when porno director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) gives him the chance to star in a an X-rated film.
Eddie takes to the porno scene like a duck to water, and, after changing his name to the more appropriately bizarre Dirk Diggler, he becomes the hottest thing in the industry.
We then follow Dirk's story as the porn world moves (along with the rest of the country) into the coke-fueled, greed-driven 1980s. Though the script is often very funny, things get progressively darker until the characters have no choice but to run for the light at the end of the tunnel. Some of them don't make it, while others are quite surprisingly (and maybe not all that believably) redeemed.
This redemption angle is another flat-out Scorsese lift, but it's a forgiving grace note, and, for that reason, I'll also be forgiving about it.
Passing some judgment would help
In fact, a lot of what makes "Boogie Nights" interesting is the way Anderson handles the characters, although it doesn't always work.
He's not passing judgment on anyone simply because they like to have sex on camera. The implication seems to be that the partiersers who lived through the '70s and early '80s (possibly you or someone you know) were doing lots of things that, when you look back, were selfish and often downright vile.
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Anderson has no intention of casting the first stone, and I understand this mindset, but it has the unfortunate effect of blunting a lot of the wildness that we witness in the movie.
Even when a young, probably underage, girl overdoses on cocaine at one of Horner's parties, the moment is treated as a momentary lapse in the fun.
The characters accept it as an occupational hazard, so for most of the movie it doesn't really play within the drama as anything all that hazardous. This, I think, is the movie's key failing. We're presented with dead-on snippets of the '70s and '80s, but it's hard to determine what we're supposed to think about any of it.
Scorsese's shadow looms over all
Horner's wife is a porn star named Amber Waves, played by the casually astonishing Julianne Moore. Amber is a nurturer, so much a mother to the other actors and actresses that one girl, in a coked-up state, actually calls her "Mom." I think Amber is brilliantly written, and Moore imbues her voice and mannerisms with a subtle melancholy, but Anderson is too ready to forgive before the characters have properly done any penance.
Amber is very much responsible for the life she's been living, but it almost seems we're supposed to feel that somebody forced her into it. Who that somebody is is anyone's guess. Reynolds' character, the likeliest candidate, is just as big-hearted and understanding as she is.
It's almost like we're getting a fire-and-brimstone speech told from the inside, not by a preacher, but by the "sinners." This, too, is Scorsese to the core.
I don't want to sound like I'm harping on it, because it goes down smoothly, but the movie really is crawling with Scorsese's visual flourishes -- flashbulbs that generate cuts within a scene ("Raging Bull"), dissolves that purposely disorient rather than show the passing of time ("Taxi Driver"), elaborately choreographed tracking shots through crowded parties (the famous "Goodfellas" Copa shot) and a final shot that's an obvious homage to "Raging Bull."
Best scene of all
The hits just keep on coming, but Anderson concocts one scene in particular that's unlike anything in the Scorsese canon, and it's easily the best sequence in the film.
Eddie and a couple of his cronies, wired on crystal meth, decide to try to sell a crackhead businessman a bag of baking soda (it's supposed to be coke) for $5,000. One of Eddie's friends is particularly wasted, and Eddie is very edgy about this live-wire carrying a gun to the deal.
The scene is tense enough as the businessman's henchman starts testing the baking soda for its nonexistent narcotic purity, but the amazing move is that Anderson throws in a character who's walking around the upper class L.A. digs casually tossing firecrackers. You seldom see the guy, but Eddie and his already-jumpy buddies are thrown into nervous spasms every time another firecracker goes off.
It's the best depiction I've ever seen of a drug-rattled mind, and it's more than enough reason to see the movie. Tack on the great performances and the hilarious period detail -- including scores of wonderful/bad songs -- and this one's a winner. Maybe not the world champion, but a winner.
"Boogie Nights," as you may have guessed, has some sex scenes. There's nudity, profanity, violence (one shooting is pretty nasty), virtually nonstop drug use, an OD, and one loving shot of what Randy Newman would call Eddie's "mighty sword." Rated R. 152 minutes -- 20 of which could have easily been lopped off.
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