Director Corner: Paul Thomas Anderson
Each week, I’ll watch three movies I haven’t seen—all made by the same director. Then, I’ll post my thoughts about each movie, and about the choices the director makes. For week one, we’re going with Paul Thomas Anderson.
There Will Be Blood (2007): The best film of the week.
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Ciaran Hinds, Sydney McCallister, Kevin J. O’Conner, Russell Harvard, David Willis
Mini-review: Why begin anywhere besides Daniel Day-Lewis’ tour-de-force performance as Daniel Plainview, a ruthless, murderous, win-at-all-costs oilman in the early 1900s? Day-Lewis lights up the screen with every forehead vein bulge and sinister-yet-mildly-surprised eyebrow raise, which let the audience understand his utter disgust and contempt for the person he’s speaking with.
There Will Be Blood isn’t as consistently entertaining as Boogie Nights, nor is it as imaginative as Magnolia, but that’s not by accident here. A prolific director by this point in time, PTA employs a polished pace and rhythm for There Will Be Blood, thus creating explosive moments between white spaces of suspense. The dialogue in There Will Be Blood could not be more different than those written for Magnolia; while the former takes place in 1999 Los Angeles, where PTA’s characters are poetic, verbose and indirect, the latter revolves around one direct, plain-speaking, don’t-bullshit-me character in Plainview.
There’s no dialogue for the first 15 minutes of the movie, which had five percent of me wondering if I was about to endure a two-and-a-half-hour silent film. One complaint is the lack of diversity; the absence of POC is striking, especially in comparison to Magnolia and Boogie Nights. If this movie were made in 2021, the expectation would be for PTA to write in at least one role for a black or brown voice — even if the majority of the cast is white, as a result of the plot, setting, and time period of the script.
Magnolia (1999): The most experimental film of the week.
Cast: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Blackman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Melinda Dillon, April Grace, William H. Macy, Luiz Guzman, Philip Baker Hall
Mini-review: When I watched Magnolia, I was reminded of Kid Cudi’s interlude on “Man on the Moon,” when he says, “It’s like, I’mma play all my stuff for everybody, and you know, and all my people they give me feedback… and they’ll be like “Yo, yo, why, why your shit sound so different? Like that’s a bad thing… and I be like, Why not, n****?”
I’ve never seen a movie remotely similar in style to Magnolia. Clocking in at three hours and eight minutes long, this sprawling drama set in ’90s Los Angeles follows seven separate storylines for the first two-thirds of the movie, wherein PTA shows off his world-building skills and bizarre-yet-effective dialogue amongst characters.
When it starts raining frogs—literally—in the final act, Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) is studying in the library and says, “This happens. This is something that happens.” With this line of dialogue, it’s almost as if Paul Thomas Anderson is trying to convince himself (and the audience) that torrential frog-rain is “allowed” to happen in a movie—sure, this is something that can happen, because, why not? Where else would it happen than in a fuckin’ fictional tale?
Boogie Nights (1997): The most entertaining film of the week.
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman
Mini-review: With Boogie Nights, Anderson employs another star-studded cast (many of whom appear in Magnolia) to round out his cult classic about the late 1970s porn industry in California’s San Fernando Valley.
When we first meet him, protagonist Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) is a 17-year-old busboy at a Reseda nightclub run by Maurice t.t. Rodriguez (Luis Guzman). Before long, Adams transforms into Dirk Diggler, superstar porn actor. Diggler is the hottest thing in the porn industry until his life unravels when drugs and ego take over.
PTA is giving some Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino vibes with Boogie Nights (not to say that Anderson was influenced by them, I’m just mentioning I was reminded of those directors’ styles). The long tracking shots, set to popular music from the era, remind me of Scorsese’s Goodfellas, and the dialogue is reminiscent of Tarantino at times (the sort of ‘random’ dialogue that’s reflective of real life, yet seemingly out of place in movies, traditionally). The first pool party scene, about 30 minutes in, is a good example: Anderson is in go-pro mode, capturing pool-side conversations, spinning the camera around, before locking onto a bikini-clad woman, who we follow underwater, before we pop back up for air only to go underwater once more with Mark Wahlberg’s character doing a jack-knife. All of this is done in one tracking shot, and all of it is set to Eric Burdon & War’s track, “Spill the Wine.”
If you haven’t seen Boogie Nights yet, and you’re thinking about it, just be prepared for a wild ride, because this thing gets weird — EARLY. In the first five minutes of the movie, adult film director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) spots a good-looking busboy at a 1977 Los Angeles nightclub. Horner follows the busboy (Adams) to the kitchen and makes small talk. During an awkward silence, we get the following exchange:
Adams: “So. You want five or 10?”
Horner: “What?”
Adams: “Well if you just want to see me jack off, it’s 10, but if you just want to look at it, it’s five.”
And thus, PTA sets the tone for the movie’s remaining two and a half hours.
