Boogie Nights Review- By Michael Carlisle

Title: Boogie Nights

Year: 1997

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Country: U.S
Language: English

Fame, greed, ego, talent, money and sex. Paul Thomas Anderson’s enthralling  1997 film Boogie Nights  has all this and more. Released during the madness of  James Cameron's Titanic, this much more praiseworthy film is about the nature of ego, business and drugs. It is about the dangers of swimming against the current. It’s about the rise and fall of the Adult film industry from the 1970’s to the early 1980’s.

It’s the late 70’s, porn has transcended into a medium that would seem unheard of by today’s standards of what “porn” is: Art. Porn directors of this period would make a porn FILM, this included script making, acting, set design, porn of the 70’s was more than just sex. Unfortunately this trend came to a close when the rise of video began and porn could be no longer seen as “artistic”. Much like the shift  from silent film to sound in the late 1920’s, there were a lot of people against it, however  eventually these “artistic” directors had to adjust to the change or fall in their ignorance.

Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) is one of these “artistic” directors who is a witness of this gradual shift. He is almost a Hugh Hefner character; very suave, very creative and very handsome.  He is the one responsible for finding this film’s star Dirk Diggler in a Hollywood Nightclub. Dirk Diggler aka Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) is a young adult when he meets Jack , he’s not the brightest bulb in the room and he has a very hostile relationship with his mother (“you’ll always be a bum!” his mother screams) but he has one special talent which will soon make him one of the greatest porn stars in the business. When Dirk meets the Colonel, the financer of Horner’s films, he shows this “special talent” to him. Colonel’s face shows a small smile and immediately we understand what  Dirk’s “special talent” is, his incredibly  large member.

Perhaps Boogie Nights was karma for Fargo?

Amazingly Boogie Nights is not very pornographic itself,  it doesn’t glorify porn or suggest that porn is the product of the devil, rather it discusses the rise and fall of the porn industry on a very intelligent level.  The nudity is limited, we don't even see Diggler's "special talent" until near the end of the film, and the overall mood seems very balanced, it can go from deeply tragic to absurdly humorous without missing a beat, very much like another 90's classic: Fargo. Infact William H. Macy is in this film as well and delivers one of the funniest lines in Boogie Nights. “My wife has an ass in her cock!” he says, flustered at the fact that his wife is cheating on him.

The soundtrack and score add to the mood of the film. It creates a sense of wonder and amazement when the film stays in the 70’s when everything is great with porn. It creates humour and dread in the 80’s, one scene where the soundtrack creates absurd humour Dirk and his buddies are robbing a coke dealer’s place and “Jessie’s Girl” is being played, earlier when Dirk has to prostitute himself the score creates a moment of tension, distress and anxiety, you feel something will be going very wrong very soon.

In conclusion,  Paul Thomas Anderson is a master of film, he cannot go wrong with anything he does. Punch Drunk Love? Great. There Will Be Blood? Genius. Boogie Nights shows that Anderson was as much a great director in the 90’s as he is now. Not a scene is wasteful, not a single shot is unimportant.  He abandons the typical Hollywood usage of sex in film even though he can easily do so. This film is not about sex but about the human qualities about character and how greed and ambition can poison the soul.  Anderson makes this film, about the porn industry, so well he amazingly it avoids an NC-17 Rating. Now that is talent. Praise it! 5/5