Even at 2½ hours Boogie Nights is so nimbly entertaining it breezes by. Working from his own script, Paul Thomas Anderson has fashioned an apt American fable: a pilgrim’s progress unfolding across a shifting social canvas from the late 1970s through the early 1980s. Because it hews to a line of “visual storytelling,” the film falls short of moment—unless one is resigned to Matthew Arnold’s remark, in “Resignation,” “Not deep the poet sees, but wide.” For what it is, an Altmanian exercise, though, the film is recommended light viewing.
Had it not tagged a profitable comedy a decade earlier, Big might have been the movie’s title. Consider the premise. While bussing at a San Fernando Valley night spot, a 17-year-old high-school dropout, Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg, former Calvin Klein underwear model Marky Mark), is “discovered” by an “adult film” director, Jack Horner (dead-eyed Burt Reynolds). Eddie’s talent? Eddie has told his steady lay, “Everyone’s blessed with one special thing.” Eddie’s is his giant cock. No small matter, this; indeed, another character, Horner’s production coordinator, “Little Bill” (sadsack William H. Macy), ends up, sexually humiliated, shooting dead his wife and her lover-of-the-day before blowing his own head off. Bill’s portrait soon covers the blood-splotch on Horner’s wall.
Size matters in the States—especially the size of one’s dreams. Eddie’s bedroom walls flash posters—they cover metaphoric splotches of blood—advertising sexy young celebrity; Eddie also wants to “be something”—to flee the dim shadow of an ineffectual father, to prove wrong a derisive and impolitely prophetic mother (Joanna Gleason, poignancy dropped in acid), and to grab the security blanket of expensive cars and clothes. Eddie’s ticket to success is his spectacular organ (showing only its bulge and the reactions it provokes, Anderson shrewdly keeps it from our sight until the end, when it’s past being an object of interest); already the thing makes the boy $5 a pop for the mere privilege of gawking at it. Eddie, then, counts on it; others come to bank on it. Thus is the boy able to reinvent himself as porn star Dirk Diggler—a name, he feels, “that can cut glass.” He abandons his folks and, along the way, loses his politeness and sweetness—the essence of his humanity.
Eddie is a new kind of American victim. The slant and the hype of America’s glamor culture have convinced him that his prepossessing sexuality exhausts his potential. Jack Horner, one of the most evil characters ever concocted for a film, is the embodiment of this constricting claim. His residence—the nightclub in effect is its symbolic extension—is a playhouse-hangout for cast and crew who harbor dreams—pumped-up; dashed—whose sole point of connection is an always readily available supply of cocaine. Jack Horner is the King of Cocaine, a purveyor of drugs that he uses to hold together his “family” of dreamers.
Chief among these dreamers is Maggie, a.k.a. Amber Waves (Julianne Moore, artfully dispensing pathos). Her former spouse has custody of their small son, Andrew, whom he keeps away from her and her habit. Eventually, Maggie contests both the original custodial arrangement and her ex’s yet more prohibitive terms. Even as our hearts go out to this doting, tormented mother, we accept the legal decision against her; for, early on, when Andrew phones her, Maggie, deep into Jack’s coke, fails to respond. This shattered woman tries satisfying her enormous need to mother by caring for and comforting Dirk—“I love you; you’re my little baby,” she tells him tenderly while introducing him to cocaine—and another school dropout, Rollergirl (Heather Graham, vivid), who, encouraged by her, enrolls in a GED class. The overall sickness of Maggie’s surrogate parenting, though, can be seen in the taut line of failure connecting Rollergirl’s past to Rollergirl’s fate. Rollergirl never takes off her trademark skates; and the utter lack of self-regard that this implies erupts when this child uses those skates to disfigure a former classmate who “disrespects” her—perhaps the most violent moment in this very violent film.
Among other of Jack’s dreamers are a male staffer keen on Dirk; Buck Swope (Don Cheadle, winning), who scrambles belatedly to create a sense of self, spurred by the hope of someday owning his own discount stereo shop—a hope frustrated when his bank denies his loan application on the basis of his involvement with pornography, and collaterally to slap down a black man in an interracial marriage; and Horner himself who tries making, just once, rather than another jack-off piece, a movie whose story aims to hold its restless male audience. (It’s part of the problem with Boogie Nights that Anderson also seems to hold the latter kind of film in higher regard.)
But the film mainly follows Dirk, whose greatest asset, not his penis but his likeability, recedes into the self-important porn action star he becomes, this transformation the result of his ever increasing self-doubts and sense of threat in a cutthroat industry. Whereas ’70s-Dirk dislikes filmed violence against women (“That’s not sexy,” he creditably opines), ’80s-Dirk exploits and defends it. When Horner fires him for insubordination, Dirk, now in his twenties and, because of his cocaine habit, broke, scrambles for a fresh footing, deludedly trying singing before joining another of Jack’s canceled brood and the latter’s psychotic buddy (Thomas Jane, wonderfully flamboyant) for a drug deal that goes south into a bloodbath. Humbled, Dirk beseeches Jack for help; their conciliatory hug bears the satanic hint of Jack’s family name—a suggestion (lest we just don’t “get it”) made visually obvious when a just-above-the-shoulder camera follows Horner as, self-satisfied, he roves his domain, looking into this room and that, left and right, at all those souls (pointedly excluded from the frame) whom he has come to possess as compensation for his own emptiness. Anderson’s identification with this shot makes one wonder if, in his mid-twenties, even he “gets it.”
Jack’s place, this makeshift hell, this club of broken dreamers: in the Carter-’70s a haven from racism, judgmentalism, homophobia, it becomes in the Reagan-’80s a dead-end trap for defectives—a grotesque parody of “alternative family.” Aspiration has degenerated into unvoiced defeat except for Horner, the complacent family head feeding off the other members; it’s a new morning in Jack’s America. His, though, is a hollow triumph; dreams can be realized only outside his grip. Consider the ironic demonstration of this that Buck’s experience provides. Denied the bank loan over his past connection with Horner, Buck, now disengaged from Jack, gets by pure accident the money he needs when a donut shop robbery he has innocently crossed ends in the deaths of everyone else, including the thieves, leaving Buck (which rhymes with luck) with a bundle of loot. Rather than the Land of Opportunity where goal-directed effort pays off, America is a game of chance where one doesn’t always even know what the game is; Buck finally, miraculously, wins, while Dirk, an unwitting party to another robbery, loses everything but his life, bringing him crawling back to Horner. Alas, his penile meal-ticket has lost its capacity to enlarge and discharge—one final reflection of Horner’s constrictive, appropriative nature. Now only Jack’s patronizing illusions can bring Dirk’s dick back to hard life.
The times are a-changin’. The porno industry that Jack represents has itself undergone a transformation, from using expensive film to using cheap, flat videotape, from “friendly” accounting practices to rigid economy, from great haste in shooting to ten times greater haste—and, along with all this, the passing of power from the hands of the spaniel-like Colonel, Horner’s former bankroller now in prison over his “weakness” for young girls, to the hands of a steely Doberman, Floyd Gondoli, with no such taste as afflicts the Colonel (Philip Baker Hall, Robert Altman’s Richard Nixon, again brilliant: “I like simple things, like butter in my ass and lollipops in my mouth”), a Reagan-era profiteer and downsizer—America’s bleak, cold, bloodless future.
Hall, among today’s most gifted American film actors, gives the crowning performance in a splendid cast. And Reynolds? He has the requisite look of the devil and a huge advantage, for all he has to be is minimally competent to take one by surprise. This is the performance of his life. However, it admits none of the accents of repressed homosexuality that the role indicates. Even at the peak of his form, therefore, Reynolds holds onto image—the grip of a celebrity, not of an actor.
