“Boogie Nights” (1997)
“Hard Eight” might have put Anderson on the map, but it was “Boogie Nights” that circled him in red and drew a giant arrow next to him, marking him as one of the major breakouts of the mid-1990s indie/studio revolution alongside the likes of Quentin Tarantino and David O. Russell. Seeing the director set up shop in the San Fernando Valley, where he was raised, the film centers on Eddie (Mark Wahlberg), a high-school dropout who’s selected for stardom by porn director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds, in a role turned down by Warren Beatty, who reportedly wanted to play Wahlberg’s role instead…). Rechristened Dirk Diggler, our hero finds himself with a new surrogate family, including co-stars John C. Reilly, Heather Graham, Don Cheadle, and Julianne Moore, boom operator Philip Seymour Hoffman, and assistant director William H. Macy. But as the glory years of the 1970s turn into the 1980s, the group descend into a murky mire of addiction, prostitution, crime, and perhaps worst of all, shooting on videotape (even before shooting on digital was a thing, PTA was taking a stand against it). It could be argued that the filmmaker would go on to make stranger, richer, more distinctive work, and this is still evidence of a director nodding to his influences—mainly Scorsese and, of course, Altman—but nothing in his career to date is quite as satisfying, quite as vibrant. The filmmaking is dazzling, but the cast of characters even more so, with a warmth and compassion to the way that every performance (even Reynolds, who fired his agent after seeing the movie—he was later nominated for an Oscar) comes across. Perhaps most importantly, there’s a deep melancholy to the second half of the picture—it’s divided almost perfectly by that bravura, shocking shot in which Macy’s Little Bill kills his wife in a murder/suicide at a busy party—that lingers long after the firecracker filmmaking. A filmmaker that made “Boogie Nights” could probably retire pretty happily, but that Anderson has continued to grow in the years since makes him one of the modern greats. [A]
“Magnolia” (1999)
A consensus around Paul Thomas Anderson’s position as one of the preeminent, visionary American directors is pretty easy to achieve. Not so easy is a consensus over which is his best film. Excluding “Hard Eight,” perhaps, there are people who will go to bat for almost every one of his films to take the title of the PTA Masterpiece, and despite personal preference, the reasonable viewer has to admit that there are probably at least three that could easily take the crown. However, this writer is not reasonable at all, “Magnolia” is Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film. A glorious, aching, sprawling mosaic of individually perfect moments and performances, marshalled together into a seamlessly elegant, orchestral whole, “Magnolia” is precisely the sort of outrageously ambitious ensemble film that should, especially running over three hours, collapse into pretension. But Anderson’s note-perfect tonal control, his formal flair, and peerless talent for casting and getting the best from some of the finest actors of their generations, combine instead into something sublime. The interlocking stories of nine different L.A. inhabitants somehow coalesce into a single story of the grandest philosophical and ontological scope. Featuring career highs for John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, Jason Robards, Melora Walters (oh, that smile!) Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise(best-ever), William H. Macy, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and shot with fluidity, warmth, and compositional grace, Anderson still has room for experiments. These sequences, like the famous montage of the characters singing Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up,” are never just grandstanding, there’s an emotional need for them to happen as they do. Maybe that’s the great trick that “Magnolia” pulls off so dazzlingly. Its momentum is so strong that it carries us smoothly over narrative bumps until it feels like it simply takes off, flying on an emotional plane high above the ground below. To have the balls to attempt “Magnolia” is impressive. To have the craft to pull it all together is more remarkable still. But to have the compassion and insight to make it sing such a clear, bittersweet, lovely song about life and death and chance and goddamn regret, is nothing short of incredible. [A+]
“Punch-Drunk Love” (2002)
After the quick one-two punch of “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia,” serious, wildly entertaining epics full of attention-grabbing filmmaking and bold ideas, Anderson’s fans must have reacted with puzzlement to the idea that the director’s next film was a 90-minute romantic comedy starring none other than fratboy comedy A-lister Adam Sandler. It’s likely that they were even more baffled by the finished product, which proved to be the director’s most divisive work up to that point. Indeed, the disharmony continues today. Some believe the film to be Anderson’s greatest masterpiece, others his biggest misfire. We’re somewhere in between, though leaning to the former. The film’s occasionally problematic, and arguably minor in the PTA canon, but still swooning and gorgeous and inventive and unlike anything that the director’s made before or since. Sandler, in a performance that’s still easily his best, plays Barry, a lonely man with seven overbearing sisters (one of the film’s missteps, to be honest, coming a little close to misogyny in places), who owns his own novelty business, and has something of an anger management issue, or more accurately a blinding rage issue. He falls hard for Emily Watson’s Lena, but her business trips, his temper, and a blackmail scheme from a phone-sex operator, threaten to disrupt their blossoming love. It’s a sort of canny inversion of Sandler’s usual movies (he’s essentially playing a deeper, richer version of the character he generally plays in his studio comedies), and Anderson’s artful, borderline-experimental subversion of the genre, complete with borderline-abrasive Jon Brion score and visual art interludes by Jeremy Blake, is fascinating and unique, while still managing to be genuinely funny (in a Jacques Tati way, rather than a “Wedding Singer” way), and heart-jumpingly romantic. Indeed, the film feels like an attempt to capture the reality of being in love, not just the joy, but the panic, the anger, the sickness. But Watson’s character is such a cypher (though she’s at least painted more sympathetically than the other women here), and the film ultimately so transient, that for us, at least, it doesn’t rank with what came before or after. [B]
“There Will Be Blood” (2007)
In Which Our Hero Is Accepted By The Establishment. Anderson’s previous films had generally been made within the studio system, and even featured A-list stars, but “There Will Be Blood” was acclaimed almost immediately as an instant classic, one of the best films of the decade or, indeed, of all time. In 2012, the Sight & Sound poll of directors called it the 79th greatest film ever made. While his earlier films had found mixed success in awards season, this received eight Academy Award nominations, including winning Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit, and Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis, plus Anderson’s first directing nomination (he lost out to Joel and Ethan Coen). That’s all the more remarkable considering what a strange, unruly picture it really is. Adapted, somewhat loosely, from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!,” it stars Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, an ambitious oil prospector who sets up in California, complete with adopted son H.W, but soon becomes drawn into a long-running conflict with a local preacher, Eli (Paul Dano). It’s a massive film in every way, dealing with meaty subjects like the American dream, capitalism, religion, family, and madness, and Day-Lewis’ performance is appropriately large, from over-enunciated accent to his final, instantly quotable screaming milkshake-themed meltdown. Interestingly, the showiness of the filmmaking in Anderson’s earlier work is mostly gone here, switching gears to a classical approach that John Ford would have nodded sagely at. It’s an enormously satisfying seven-course meal of a movie, and if anything stops it from being our favorite of the director’s work, it’s that the final dessert course—that operatic jump-forward-in-time finale—feels jarring, even rushed. Still, it’s an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, and one that, after a five-year gap, announced a new, bigger and bolder phase of the director’s career. [A]
