American dreamers: "Boogie Nights"

Paul Thomas Anderson has finally won his Oscar for three decades of mostly solid-gold work, so this would seem as good a time as any to go back to 1997's Boogie Nights and see where it all began. It wasn't, of course, this filmmaker's first time: that was the previous year's Hard Eight, a taut, two-handed gambling fable that very few people saw, and even Anderson himself wasn't entirely happy with. His follow-up was something much more ambitious: a film as big (and, indeed, as long) as its central character's career-making manhood. When I wrote last year that One Battle After Another was Anderson's most Tarantinoid film, I should have qualified it: it was Anderson's most Tarantinoid film since Boogie Nights. Much as Tarantino made his name with Seventies-scored tales of how bandits and bank robbers occupied their downtime and days off, Anderson here announced himself by considering what 1970s porn stars, porn producers and porn crews might get up to on those rare afternoons when they weren't fucking or making arrangements to fuck. The crucial difference was that Anderson was a Tarantino with empathy and imagination: amid the carefree pashing of the adult film business as it was in the San Fernando Valley of the late 1970s, he located a mutually protective, quasi-familial unit whose palace of earthly delights - the home-cum-studio (and I do mean cum-studio) of pre-eminent porn producer Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) - is threatened by a sudden technological shift (the transition from the permanency of celluloid film stock, Horner's preferred medium, to cheap and unlovely video) and their own personal foibles.

As we open, all of that is in the future. Boogie Nights' secret is that it's really a hangout movie with characters who sometimes hang out naked. As generously endowed busboy Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) makes contacts and friends in the wake of his Horner-engineered rebranding as the scene's hottest new stud Dirk Diggler, so too we as viewers make contacts and friends. (And Anderson starts assembling his ultimate turn-of-the-millennium ensemble: it's fantasy football for indie-film heads.) Here's John C. Reilly as porn stablemate (and part-time magician) Reed Rothchild; here's Julianne Moore as scene elder Amber Waves, giving the performance that makes fullest sense of Britney's current predicament; here's Heather Graham, perfect casting as the wide-eyed ingenue known as Rollergirl on account of the skates she never takes off; here's William H. Macy as the sad-moustached Little Bill, working a minor miracle in giving a running cuckold gag a genuinely tragic dimension; here, belatedly, is Philip Seymour Hoffman as poor old Scotty, besotted with the broadly heterosexual Eddie from the first moment he claps eyes on him. As Eddie climbs the porn-biz ladder, we're happy for him; it feels like an indictment of 21st century Hollywood that Wahlberg was rarely this sharp and never this charming again. As the character succumbs to the druggy excesses of the early Reagan years, we back away and hope for the best. As he finds his way back to something like the light - in a truly genius close-up, to the unlikely strains of Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl" - we smile, laugh and maybe even tear up. In the meantime, we have time to marvel at the high-end craft credits: between the rich period production design, costumes and hair, and the deep-dive Seventies supercuts gracing the soundtrack (I mean, Sniff 'n' The Tears' "Driver's Seat": seriously, come on now), Boogie Nights is as deluxe and as layered as indies of this period got. From the outset, this was a filmmaker in visible search of excellence.

The key to it all may be that Jack Horner (a terrific late Reynolds performance, even if the actor himself was far from sure about it) isn't merely an avatar of vulgar, cigar-puffing capitalism, nor the sketchy idea of a porn producer we possibly all have in our heads. Instead he is - rather like Anderson - a self-improving auteur: a filmmaker with an eye, good ideas and some sense of what the audience want, recruiting the best available talent and clinging to the hope of making more than just money - of making something that lasts. (Was the film-versus-video debate in the film Anderson's response to seeing the uptake of cheap, smeary digital video on sets around him?) So yes, Boogie Nights is a film with boobs and bums and bits, but it's also a story about the struggles of someone trying to elevate their chosen art form in the face of commercial realities, told by a creative found in the process of elevating his chosen art form. Anderson makes the industry politicking at least as stimulating as the fucking, by casting such compelling performers as Philip Baker Hall (as a rival impresario) and Robert Ridgely (as the deviant moneyman The Colonel); he makes the sex properly sexy, at least for a while; and he already seems to know exactly what to do with the camera, raising us up amid the highs while never overlooking the lows, of which there are many in the second half. (One thought on this rewatch: Boogie Nights contains the first great Anderson phone call, but it's on a prison phone, and it captures Horner distancing himself from The Colonel after the latter admits his predilection for underage girls. Again, Jack has standards the wider industry doesn't.)

At a certain point, Anderson even begins entertaining and amusing himself. (Is this any different from Tarantino's self-gratification? Yes, because increasingly the latter isn't giving anybody else any pleasure.) Alfred Molina's final-reel cameo as the movie's sort-of big boss - a twitchy, gun-toting drug kingpin in a towelling dressing gown - is an obvious loose-end of a scene that's just too good (and too well-directed) to be left on the cutting-room floor, a prodigy's holler of look what I can do with cinema. In the lead-in to the business with Don Cheadle's Buck in the doughnut shop, you can spy 1999's Magnolia coming into view. And what's with the sonic mystery Anderson stitches into the very end of the closing credits? (The Internet, inevitably, has its theories.) He sets about all this with an optimism that might well be impossible for a filmmaker to summon thirty years later, with the whole world on OnlyFans: while acknowledging the darker side of pornography, he also spots that for a while, it found a place and provided some kind of home for everyone. (Here's Luis Guzman as the nightclub owner turned background artist in Dirk Diggler's first investigations.) Boogie Nights proved sex positive in a way the New Extreme Cinema emerging from Europe around the same time just wasn't: whether noting the quirks and peccadillos of the porn set or eavesdropping Jack Horner's lighting instructions to cameraman Ricky Jay ("there's shadows in life, baby"), it demonstrated a worldliness the American mainstream never really picked up on, and eventually - as it retreated into teenage bedrooms with comic books - backed nervily away from. This is the kind of public statement that needs to be appended with Diggler-length asterisks, caveats and get-out clauses, but there are points in Boogie Nights where you find yourself wondering why the legitimate motion picture business of the 2020s can't be more like the L.A. porn scene of the 1970s. Paul Thomas Anderson made saucer-eyed dreamers of us all.

Boogie Nights returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow.