Opening with a bravura seven-minute travelling shot (inspired by I Am Cuba), Boogie Nights traces the rise and fall of one Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), a prodigiously-endowed performer on the seventies porno movie scene. Burt Reynolds is the paternalistic pornographer who recognizes talent when he sees it, and sets Dirk on his way, welcoming him into his own extended family of performers and film crew (it speaks volumes that each of the large cast makes an impression, scoring laughs and pathos as we go).
Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature is a big, flamboyant, erratic ensemble epic, a fresco of southern California’s suburban sprawl set in the San Fernando Valley where he grew up. This project began as a spoof Spinal Tap type doc Anderson made while he was still in high school, The Dirk Diggler Story. But a decade later it’s clear Anderson’s deepest inspiration is Robert Altman’s Nashville. Unlike Altman, PTA is looking back at the 1970s from afar… his lens is simultaneously cynical and celebratory, varnished with a mythic nostalgia. Scorsese inevitably figures too. Like GoodFellas, Boogie Nights gets off on its own druggy, disco high — then crashes down to earth with a bump.
With Boogie Nights we know we’re not just watching episodes from disparate lives but a panorama of recent social history, rendered in bold, exuberant colors.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Nearly a quarter of a century later, Boogie Nights stands as one of the finest and most endlessly rewatchable films of the ’90s.
Kyle Smith, National Review, 2020
Paul Thomas Anderson
Mark Wahlberg, Luis Guzmán, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, Heather Graham, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alfred Molina
USA
1997
English
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Credits
Executive Producer
Lawrence Gordon, Michael De Luca, Lynn Harris
Producer
Paul Thomas Anderson, Lloyd Levin, John Lyons, Joanne Sellar
Screenwriter
Paul Thomas Anderson
Cinematography
Robert Elswit
Editor
Dylan Tichenor
Original Music
Michael Penn
Production Design
Bob Ziembicki
Also in This Series
Paul Thomas Anderson’s is a risky, unorthodox cinema, flexing between grand gestures and hidden depths, but to rewatch his films is always to discover that fleeting, elusive but profound possibility of connection.
Hard Eight
Anderson's debut is a deceptively modest character piece about a veteran gambler (Philip Baker Hall) who takes a much younger man under his wing and teaches him how to play the system and win. Until things take a darker turn...
Magnolia
This deeply personal 1999 California opus is ripe for rediscovery. Mapping the emotional traumas of half-a-dozen major characters as they criss-cross the San Fernando Valley in search of either recognition or reconciliation, it's PTA's riskiest gamble.
There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson's lacerating epic about the birth of the oil age: Daniel Day-Lewis is extraordinary as the prospector entirely consumed with his own enterprise, a Trumpian figure of naked self-assertion; Paul Dano the evangelist who may be his nemesis.
Licorice Pizza
PTA's oddball courtship comedy takes us to the San Fernando Valley in 1973. 15-year-old aspiring actor Gary Valentine has the hots for 25 year-old Alana. She's bemused but admires his self confidence. It's quirky, meandering, but it sneaks up on you.
