October 12, 1997 | In this era of high-tech trickery and humongous body counts, Hollywood screenwriters face a unique challenge: How do you keep the audience interested during the minutes between bigger, louder and ever more expensive explosions? That is, during those parts of the movie where there’s supposed to be — well, you know, a plot.
Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), a director of “exotic pictures,” faces a similar challenge in Boogie Nights. When we first meet him during the opening minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s extraordinary new film, the year is 1977, the pre-VCR heyday of porno motion pictures, and Horner is king of his particular hill. And yet, Horner isn’t content merely to provide cheap thrills for the raincoat crowd. He views his work as, if not art, an aesthetically-challenging craft. As he sees it, there should be more to making porn than wet shots and mixed combos. The question, as he sees it, is, “How do you keep them in the theater after they come?”
Horner gets tantalizingly close to finding an answer when he discerns superstar potential in Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), a busboy in a San Fernando Valley disco. Eddie has a bashful smile, an engaging manner — and, to paraphrase Robin Williams’ memorable line in The Fisher King, a schlong that’s only slightly smaller than Florida. Casting an appreciative eye at this “17-year-old piece of gold,” Horner immediately offers to give Eddie a role in his next picture. “I got a feeling,” he tells the younger man, “that beneath those jeans, something wonderful is waiting to come out.”
Eddie agrees. “Everyone is blessed with one special thing,” he tells his girlfriend, and his special thing might be his key to becoming “a big, bright shining star.” So he changes his name to Dirk Diggler and exposes his assets in Horner’s low-budget movies. (Costs must be kept to a minimum, Horner explains, because, otherwise, “Before you’ve turned around, you’ve spent maybe 20, 25, 30 thousand dollars on a movie!”) And the hits just keep on coming, so to speak, when Eddie… er, I mean, Dirk suggests they make a movie that combines hard-core sex with action-movie heroics.
In the editing room, Horner takes one look at their cheesy exploitation epic, and nearly weeps tears of joy. “This is a film,” he says without the slightest trace of irony, “that I want them to remember me by.”
And so it goes in Boogie Nights, the best American movie to flash across the screen since L.A. Confidential. With his first film, a moody chamber drama titled Hard Eight, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson established himself as a filmmaker of great promise. With this, his second effort, he more than fulfills that promise. A panoramic and episodic overview of the porn film industry from the late 1970s to the early ’80s, Boogie Nights is consistently fascinating, repeatedly surprising and frequently exhilarating.
What it definitely isn’t, amazingly enough, is unduly graphic. Boogie Nights is more sympathetic than salacious, and less censorious than genuinely curious, as it follows the interlocking misadventures of several self-deluding characters on the bottom rungs of the showbiz food chain. The movie vividly evokes a party-hearty ’70s ambiance — acres of polyester, wall-to-wall disco vibes — and is equally specific in depicting the long hangover of the early ’80s. But when it comes to actually showing what Dirk and his co-stars do in their movies, Boogie Nights prefers to be artfully suggestive, knowingly allusive.
To be sure, a great deal of Anderson’s discretion was dictated by his desire to avoid the stigma of an NC-17 rating. In the end, however, Anderson’s somewhat evasive approach to his lurid material has relatively little to do with being commercially astute, and almost everything to do with being aesthetically and psychologically valid. Because, ultimately, Boogie Nights is not so much a story about sex on (and off) screen as it is a bemused consideration of the sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary eccentricities of disparate individuals united by a common interest. Think of it as Nashville with porno movies substituted for country music. Indeed, once you get past the sex, you quickly realize that the most subversive thing about Boogie Nights is its notion of what constitutes family values.
The sprawling screenplay is structured around the rise and fall — or, to be more precise, the rise, fall and tentative rehabilitation — of Dirk Diggler, the porn-again saint of sexy cinema. Mark Wahlberg plays Dirk with remarkable charm and vitality as the ex-busboy rises to the top by making the making the most of his “one special thing.” But Wahlberg is every bit as convincing, and even more unsettling, as Dirk becomes an egocentric cokehead who can barely stand upright in his platform shoes.
Anderson lays it on just a little thick when, after Horner fires Dirk, the ex-busboy endures a crash-and-burn nightmare of drug dealing and flesh peddling. (You can’t help thinking: “Gee, is Horner the only porno moviemaker who’d hire Dirk?”) But this is only a prelude for the movie’s real show-stopper, a brilliantly sustained and scarily skittish sequence that has Dirk and a friend trying to rob a rich free-baser (Alfred Molina) with a tripwire temper. This is a big mistake. But it’s also the event that leads to a “reunion” of the outcasts, egotists and blissed-out, over-sexed innocents who have joined forces to make sex movies — and, more important, to form a mutually supportive extended family.
Wahlberg (who establishes his credentials as a major film actor) and Reynolds (who re-establishes his) are first and second among equals in the world-class ensemble cast. Other notables include Julianne Moore as an X-rated actress who can move from maternal to nymphomaniacal in a heartbeat; Heather Graham as Rollergirl, a spirited high-school dropout who will do anything on camera except take off her skates; John C. Reilly as Dirk’s slightly less well-endowed buddy and co-star; Don Cheadle as a porno actor who, all things considered, would rather run a stereo-equipment store; and William H. Macy as Little Bill, a production assistant whose nickname may explain why his sexy wife (real-life adult-movie star Nina Hartley) likes to embarrass him by having public sex with other men. Even in the world of Boogie Nights, her behavior seems a bit, uh, extreme. You’d almost think she cares nothing about family values.
