Boogie Nights

Year: 1997

Grade: A+

Country: USA

Director: Anderson

Review

an absolutely great picture. p.t. anderson has a gift for making films and this one may be the greatest testament to that fact. if you look at the inserts he uses early in the film to establish location and mood you see that filmmaking is just as much an art as it is a technique. when we’re at dirk diggler’s home, for example, and we first see his family we are introduced to the location by brief shots of coffee being poured and bacon cooking on a pan. immediately the audience gets the sense of suburban americana. anderson contrasts this with what happens over breakfast in the next couple minutes to establish the fragmentation of the traditional family. of course this theme is reinforced throughout the film, perhaps most shockingly in the case of william h. macy’s character who ushers in the 1980s with a bang. which brings me to the acting…it is uniformly excellent, even mark walhberg turns in an inspiring performance in a very demanding lead role. secondary and tertiary actors like john c. reilly, burt reynolds, luis guzman, julianne moore, heather graham, don cheadle and philip seymore hoffman all turn in career performances. the cinematography in this film is amazing. camera movement is abundant and adds all sorts of vitality and fluidity to the picture. the pool party scene is especially great. but without the excellent musical supervision some of the longer scenes would appear a little flat. anderson expertly weaves musical pieces into medleys of his own. again, this adds a flow and vitality to the picture that makes 150 minutes seem much shorter. martin scorsese’s “casino” is the film that most resembles this one, but where scorsese’s film had a noir overtone to it (“casino” begins at the end, is fatalistic, and employs voice-over narration), boogie nights is an ultimately uplifting and life-affirming work. anderson’s optimism is similar to that of kurosawa – both acknowledge the ugliness of the world and choose life in spite of that ugliness. it’s a film that has everything and does everything. it’s a wonderfully assured opus from one of the great storytellers and filmmakers of my time, and i hope he continues to operate on anything close to this level.