The Happy Pornographers
I suppose it sounds strange
to call Boogie Nights yet another drama of family values. The film
follows a well-hung stud in the Los Angeles porn-flick industry, and it doesn't
shy away from recounting his lewder adventures. It even invites us to love him
and all his scummy, sinning friends. Our hero, Eddie (Mark Wahlberg--but this
sounds all wrong, you still want to call him Marky Mark), is recruited into the
world of porn in 1977, when he is 17. This happens because Eddie still lives at
home with his awful parents; a wimpy father and a drunken mother, who runs
around the house calling him stupid. He dreams vaguely of stardom, but for the
time being works as a dishwasher in a nightclub. One night, a customer, Jack
Horner (Burt Reynolds), who happens to be a porn director, spots talent beneath
Eddie's bulging zipper. Back in the kitchen, Jack asks him to pull out his love
gun. His suspicions are confirmed, and he tells Eddie to call him about getting
into the business. We know we should be horrified, but we're not. We've seen
Eddie's mom. We know how badly he needs a pat on the back. Against our better
instincts, we think, "Go with this nice older man."
The
writer and director of Boogie Nights , Paul Thomas Anderson, waits awhile
before playing his cards. The early scenes unfold with a patience that's rare
in movies these days. Like a kinder, gentler Robert Altman, Anderson takes time
to introduce us to his underground drifters. Eddie goes for his audition, which
turns out to be sex on Jack's couch with a pretty but inappropriately cheerful
runaway, Rollergirl (Heather Graham), so named because she lives her whole life
on skates. Soon he's shooting his debut movie under the name of Dirk Diggler.
His first day on the set is a classic novice-in-Hollywood scene, except that
the logistics of the shoot involve the cleansing of vaginas and polite
whispered negotiations about where to ejaculate. The atmosphere is supportive,
even wholesome, until Anderson finally stirs in some sicko stuff. A woman at a
pool party ODs. Another woman, who is married, has sex with a stranger on the
driveway while five strangers stand around watching. Slowly, Anderson cooks up
a simultaneously lighthearted and sinister mood, as if this were a thriller set
at summer camp.
He seems to be saying that there are two sides to every
situation, and he's helped out immensely by Wahlberg's charismatic and subtle
performance as Eddie-turned-Dirk. This is a character to whom it would be easy
to condescend, but Wahlberg captures his nobility without skimping on his
stupidity. When Eddie starts out, he thinks of sex as a calling, a gift he can
give to people. Wahlberg is heartbreakingly natural as this ignorant naif; he
cries out to be protected, like a puppy whose paws and ears are still
disproportionately large. He's vulnerable without the narcissism that has
characterized so much vulnerable-male acting since Brando. I suppose it's
central to his appeal that his looks even shift from macho to feminine: At
different points his tiny eyes and wide, thin-lipped mouth reminded me of the
preppy convicted rapist Alex Kelly, and the French Canadian actress Genevieve
Bujold.
Boogie
Nights follows Dirk from 1977, when promiscuity was still socially
acceptable and porn actors still dreamed of being recognized as legitimate
artists, through 1984, by which time a combination of Reagan-era values and the
rise of low-quality video has brought the industry crashing back to earth. It's
an ambitiously wide time span to take on, especially since the audience is
likely to know it intimately, but for the most part, Anderson gets the tight
shirts and the light-blue eye shadow and the fake wood paneling right. There
are scratches on the veneer of authenticity, though. The soundtrack is less
evocative than hyperactive: It runs the gamut from Eric Burdon & War's
"Spill The Wine" to Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl," and the songs are
usually heard several years later than people in real life would have listened
to them. And Rollergirl should have thrown out her skates long before the movie
ended in 1984. As I recall it, the entire country spent the early '80s in a
seizure of revulsion over the late '70s, and the brief disco-era roller-skating
fad placed a close second to Vietnam in terms of national shame. There's an
indiscriminateness to these lapses, an overconfidence. In the press kit,
Anderson is quoted as saying, with amazing chutzpah, that he called on his
"very specific memories of the way Los Angeles looked and felt" to re-create
the period. The press kit also informs us that Anderson is 26, which means that
what we're seeing is based on the memories of a 6-year-old.
In a way, this sloppy handling of the retro
elements is refreshing. Anderson is young enough to be post-hip and
post-ironic, if such terms are possible (can anything still be post-anything
nonironically?). He's got a sense of humor, but he's more interested in
character and motivation. Jack Horner's entourage is explicitly presented as a
dysfunctional makeshift family: Besides father Jack and sister Rollergirl, Dirk
finds a mother figure in the porn actress Amber Waves (Julianne Moore, who does
a good job of looking beautiful in one scene and puffy in the next), and a
brother in the ugly, dumb, good-natured hack actor Reed Rothchild (John C.
Reilly). Dirk and this group slowly isolate themselves from the world. They
shield and indulge each other; they snort coke together the way a regular
family might grill hot dogs. And as a shrink might say, they lack boundaries.
Amber is sad because she has a little son she's no longer allowed to see. So
she tells Dirk that she loves him as if he were her baby, and then she seduces
him. Their strong feelings for each other are real, but they are also
astonishing feats of denial, and Anderson acts as both sympathizer and
judge.
The idea that wherever we
are, we need a family, is interesting, up to a point. It was the main conceit
in Anderson's first film, Hard Eight , a neo-noir set in Reno, Nev.,
about an ex-mobster who takes on an imbecile protégé and loves him like a son.
But like any idea, it gets simplistic when carried too far, and late in
Boogie Nights it explodes into cheap melodrama. Without a good role
model to guide him, Dirk snorts so much coke that his one real talent poops
out. He slides downhill and gets beaten up--punished, essentially, for having
gone too far with this fantasy family and having lost his grip on reality. And
in an extremely sadistic overlapping scene, we see Rollergirl momentarily burst
out of her passive bubble and brutalize one jerk for all the abuse men have
subjected her to over the years. Without guidance, she's lost all morals and
turned into a cauldron of rage. These late scenes are over the top, as mean and
reductive as editorials in a tabloid, and they nearly extinguish the moral
subtlety of what's gone before. One even hopes they are insincere, an attempt
by Anderson to stay in step with the Zeitgeist of the '90s and the
Promise Keepers. It would be a shame if someone this talented meant them in
earnest.
"She's a mother to all
those who need love."--Diggler (Wahlberg), Horner (Reynolds), and Waves (Moore)
in Boogie Nights
(41 seconds) :
"Chocolate love"--Buck
Swope (Don Cheadle) and Becky Barnett (Nicole Ari Parker) discuss style in
Boogie Nights
(37 seconds) :
