The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)

Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is a man so wracked by his carnal urges that he walks in convulsive, post-coital spasms and pants in ragged thrusts when he runs. At the conclusion of World War II, the seaman joins his comrades on a beach in the Pacific, wrestling, copulating with a woman made of sand and masturbating in a grimly violent celebration of peace. Back home, Freddie reports for a military psych evaluation, a farcical conveyor belt that feeds disturbed soldiers through a handful of perfunctory, still-new techniques in a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health. The results clearly show an unwell man, but director Paul Thomas Anderson cuts abruptly to the sailor working as a mall photographer, posing families into the waxy, beaming photos that define the period. Freddie effectively applies mortar to the bricks of postwar conformity, cementing it by turning every family into a false, overlit, eerie perfect image. Eventually, the irony gets to this loner, and he finds himself thrown into the wildernerss to drift.

Unable to fit in with even smaller communities, Freddie eventually stumbles his way to a yacht about to set sail, Anderson follows behind the man and racks the background in and out of focus, signifying Freddie's desire to be a part of the gathering on-board and his knowledge that he would not fit in. (In a less abstract way, it may also just be a visualization of Freddie's perpetual state of drunkenness, brought on by his homemade, paint-thinner-laced hooch.) Soon, Freddie wakes up in a cot on the ship, invited to meet the man in charge. The man (Philip Seymour Hoffman), does not give his name. Instead, he quizzes Freddie with a tone of disappointment, like a father whose boy has come home late. This puts Freddie at ease as much as it fills him with an embarrassment he does not typically feel as a freely fighting and fucking scoundrel. The man invites Freddie to remain with him, and the spastic, vulgar seaman soon finds himself the right-hand man in a burgeoning cult movement.

Boogie Nights

Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights revolves around one of the most darkly comic MacGuffins in cinematic history. Like the shark in Jaws, the member of Dirk Diggler at once drives the film and remains unseen, achieving a mythic quality before the payoff. We gauge its size through the reaction shots of those who gaze upon it. Anderson films close-ups of widened eyes and slacked jaws; women (and jealous, insecure men) gaze lustfully at Dirk's diggler, and its symbolic import drives most of the film. Yet just as the shark ultimately didn't live up to the hype -- who can miss that bounce when the shark leaps onto the boat? -- so too does Dirk's member fail to measure up in the end, a flaccid and impotent fossil of the great beast it once was.

Boogie Nights' immediate and most pervasive influence is, of course, Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas: both use highly stylized direction (Anderson's clearly derives from Marty's) to weave an epic tragicomedy of a seedy underworld, GoodFellas with organized crime and Boogie Nights the porn industry. Anderson defines his world with two early, extended tracking shots, one in a discotheque that briefly introduces the large cast and a second, at a pool party, that gives them shape and definition. Both of these tracking shots, as with the magnificent shots of the club and the Copa in GoodFellas, are shimmering and sensual, not so much calling attention to themselves -- as so many extended tracking shots do -- but calling attention to themselves through the narcissism of the world it paints; in both films, the shots justify themselves by reflecting the vanity and self-indulgence of the areas they profile.

At the discotheque works Dirk (né Eddie Adams), a high school dropout who cleans dishes in between working as a male prostitute. His home life recalls Rebel Without a Cause, a harpy-like mother who snaps at her submissive husband; Dirk has to take a bus from Torrance to Reseda to work at the nightclub, a job he could just as easily get closer to home, but then he might not enjoy the benefit of that extra hour each way away from his family. One night, Eddie meets Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), an adult film director who's heard rumors of the particularly gifted washroom boy. Jack invites the lad to his lavish home in the suburbs, a convenient offer when Eddie runs away from home, and before you know it Eddie renames himself Dirk and jumps into his new occupation with vigor.

Toeing the line between absurdity and epic tragedy, Boogie Nights charts the rise and fall of the Me Generation through the highs and lows of the pornography industry, the snowblind cocaine binge of its stars a microcosm for the nation's own drug escapism and the effect of the VHS tape on the business representative of the Reagonomic turn to cold, pragmatic capitalism above all else. Anderson, for his part, understands how ridiculous his story is, and he fills the screen with goofball characters too odd to be anything but believable, such as Don Cheadle as a country music-loving porn star who by day works as a stereo salesman and audiophile; Heather Graham as a young starlet who never takes off her roller skates; John C. Reilly as Reed Rothchild, the former big star who gets gently shoved to the role of the sidekick to make way for Dirk even before the kid enters the business; and William H. Macy as Bill, the cuckolded assistant director, always forced to suffer the indignity of his wife's (porn star Nina Hartley, who ironically enjoyed reportedly the most stable and longest lasting relationship in the business*) public adultery.

Too, Anderson uses his camera with a great deal of wit: he oversaturates the pool party with light, a cheeky emphasis on the sunny appeal of this line of work to the impressionable and, as we learn quickly, childlike Dirk. When Scotty (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the gay boom operator, arrives, Anderson cuts to his POV, framing Dirk in an iris. Naturally, the scenes involving actual porn shoots are hysterical, with the characters woodenly delivering basic dialogue as Jack looks on, brow furrowed in concentration as if a compatriot of the New Hollywood filmmakers taking cinema to bold new territories around the same time. Anderson's stylistic quick-tracks and brightly colored sheen are captivating and immersive even as they are off-putting, gently separating us from the fast-paced, gaudy world he's documenting to allow us to spot the cracks forming before the world of leopard prints and suede crumbles around them.

Working with a cast of Altmanesque proportions, Anderson nevertheless adheres to Scorsese's GoodFellas formula of centering the action on a few characters and rooting the camera in the point of view of the main protagonist. Like Henry Hill, Eddie/Dirk falls into his seedy line of work in adolescence -- Henry starts working for the mob as a boy, while the emotionally stunted, teenage Eddie finds the same familial comfort in adult films -- and rises through the ranks by knowing the game in and out. Dirk even has a primal innocence that Hill never exhibited: in his first shoot, he sheepishly asks if he's doing well, gently asking for encouragement from both his partner in the scene and the people filming. Even as he edges Reed to the sidelines, he develops a deep friendship with the guy. Yet, as Henry before him, Dirk loses himself to cocaine, the white powder affecting his performance and seeding jealous paranoia in his mind, fueling an impotent rage that sends him into a tailspin. Mark Wahlberg, then underwear model and wannabe rapper who played like the New Kids on the Block (of which his brother Donnie was a member) crossed with Vanilla Ice, manages to walk the same tightrope Ray Liotta traversed, between reactive dependency on the factors that affect the character and propulsive acting.

Also key to the story and its thematic purpose is Jack. Played by Burt Reynolds, possibly the icon of '70s populist cinema, Jack represents a perversion of the nostalgia of the decade. As much as he's a seasoned pro, Jack genuinely believes the bullshit he's slinging -- that he's a true filmmaker bringing art to the genre, that he discovers and fosters artistic talent and that he's a father figure to these strung-out, lost children -- and Reynolds makes us like him almost in spite of himself. Perhaps the central performance of the film, however, is Julianne Moore as Amber Waves, the aging porn star who projects the matronly love she's not allowed to give her actual child, separated by her vindictive ex-husband, onto the people in the business, offering a bastion of warmth and support for kids too dumb to realize that she's worse than all of them. She acts out a reverse Oedipal complex with Dirk, her feelings falling somewhere in-between motherly love and sexual lust; a testament to her misplaced sensibilities, she is the one who first offers Dirk cocaine, setting in motion his downfall.

Boogie Nights takes a turn for the worse, symbolically, on the eve of the new decade, with a murder-suicide that grinds the festivities and optimism to a screeching halt. Bill's explosive solution to his wife's infidelity is brief and brutal, ushering in the age of instant gratification: soon, Jack's financier (Robert Ridgely) is busted for possession of child pornography, and his new producer (Philip Baker Hall) curtly tears down Jack's belief in the art of his films, forcing the director to make cheap, to-the-point pictures to be released straight to VHS.

A dark comedy floats over the entire picture, but it dives into the blackest abyss in the third act. Buck (Cheadle) cannot secure a loan for his own stereo outlet, as the bank won't finance a porn star, thus trapping him in the lifestyle. His dream become a harsh nightmare, Jack's cool enthusiasm for his work transforms into bitter workmanship, and both he and Rollergirl unleash their pent-up fury on a derisive amateur performer. Dirk and Reed fall out of the porn business in their addled and attempt to land a record deal, and dire straits force Dirk to return to his life as a male prostitute, leading to an altercation with a group of homophobes.

Brilliantly illustrating the cultural shift from the carefree, self-appraising narcissism and the outright, desperate solipsism of Reagan's '80s is the final extended scene, in which Dirk, Reed and their buddy Todd (Thomas Jane) attempt to scam and rob a drug dealer (Alfred Molina). Molina's apartment condenses the difference between the two decades by replacing the faux-homely, gaudy, sickly warm splendor of '70s decor with icy modern interior design: harsh, white lighting illuminating the slick, mathematically precise furniture, speakers booming soulless synth-pop to match the feel of the decor. One of the most twisted, bizarrely funny sequences I can recall seeing -- and the only sequence in contemporary film that matches the odd tension of one of Quentin Tarantino's elongated scenes -- Todd's plan strikes us as doomed from the start and only gets worse as Molina bandies wildly about the place waving a gun around while a Vietnamese boy in the corner of the living room tosses firecrackers to freak these coked-up robbers out even further. It ends with the sudden, comic brutality of a Tarantino climax, paving the way for a change of heart in Dirk.

Boogie Nights ends with the characters reconciled, several living in Jack's home, the familial undertones of initial interactions now fully developed ties. Yet the comforting ending belies the tragedy of the film: whenever any of these characters interact with the outside world -- as they did in most of the third act -- they are beaten, shot, derided and shunned. Jack will never make another film that will play in a theater; Amber will never gain custody of her child; Dirk and Rollergirl are just two high school dropouts with talents that can be considered old and useless on a yearly basis (surf a few web sites on a virus-protected computer to see an industry that shoehorns its performers into the mature category before they even hit 30**). Anderson is kind enough (though perhaps naïve) not to show any characters ravaged by AIDS, as we so many porn stars during the '80s (among them John Holmes, the basis for Dirk Diggler), but one could scarcely call the ending a happy one. These characters are trapped in their version of Grey Gardens, cut off by a world that sanctimoniously condescends to them even as they increasingly embrace pornography's ethos of gratification and hollow glamor. Even in their glitzy, expensive estate, they're as manipulated and castrated by Reagan's economy and the rise of empty moralism as the poor.



*Research for this film was...interesting.
** Again, very interesting.

Punch-Drunk Love

Following the highly-lauded ensemble drama Magnolia, modern auteur Paul Thomas Anderson scaled things way back, offering up a surreal romantic comedy called Punch-Drunk Love. Reviews were mixed, which is just as well since I hated Magnolia so there was nowhere to go but up for me. In hindsight, Punch-Drunk Love, though wildly different in story and theme, firmly points towards the direction he would take with his masterpiece There Will Be Blood.

Adam Sandler reaches into the darker side that always came with his comedy and expands it into a full force as Barry Egan, an executive at a small company that makes novelties toiletries. He tends to avoid any lasting conversation and especially fears phone calls from his seven sisters, who torment him in that way that seems playful to them but never to the person being teased. We see him ably speaking to a potential client before he answers a phone call, but when he picks up the receiver and hears one of his sister's voices you can see something change in him immediately: he stutters, avoids simple questions and generally looks like a caged animal looking for an escape.

At the start of the film, Barry gets to work before anyone else to find a truck has dumped a harmonium out front. He runs and hides behind a wall as if afraid it will see him. A woman, Lena (Emily Watson), drives up and asks Barry if he would take her car keys and give them to the auto mechanic next door when they open. Later we learn that she set this up because she spotted a picture of Barry on one of his sister's desks at work. She seems to know about Barry's mental instability but is attracted to him anyway.

Barry's psychosis comes to the fore when he attends his sister's birthday party. He arrives at her house, opens the door hears his sister's laughing over an old story about how they teased him, tries to leave unnoticed, then opens the door to go back in. At the party, he tries to speak calmly but flubs words as his sisters open old wounds. Finally, he can take no more and kicks out the glass doors.

Lena eventually asks Barry on a date, and he nervously accepts. When they go to a restaurant, he mentions how he's buying up pudding cups to exploit a frequent flier miles giveaway (based on a true story). The two hit it off, until Lena brings up something Barry's sister told her about his childhood, and Barry excuses himself to the bathroom, which he promptly destroys. Of course he is thrown out of the restaurant, but Lena follows along as if nothing happened. I cannot say what Lena sees in Barry. Maybe it's the fact that she's an only child and envies someone who grew up surrounded by siblings, or perhaps she realizes that, because Barry grew up surrounded by his teasing sisters, he feels as lonely as she. Then again, maybe she just has latent S&M tendencies and loves Barry for his violent streak.

Barry feels something too, though he doesn't know how to act upon it. He's found someone who not only managed to see through that placid mask he presents to the world and understands his inner fury to be something more than "weirdness" as his sisters label it, but to love him anyway. When Lena heads to Hawaii, Barry drags his friend (Luis Guzman) along to all the grocery stores in town to clean out pudding cups, only to find that the company takes 6-8 weeks to process his claim for the flier miles. After a mild freak out, Barry just buys a damn ticket. It's a simple moment, but quietly hilarious and touching. The two meet on Waikiki Beach in the kind of perfect moment that normally would earn a groan, but works in a film that never lets on in what direction it's heading.

Early on, Barry calls a phone sex service though not, we sense, because he wants the actual service. He speaks to a woman who tries to stimulate him, but he sounds almost confused by the instructions she gives him, as if he doesn't know what to do. The next morning she calls back and tries to extort money from him, sending four "blond brothers" to strongarm him when he refuses. Barry gives up $500 in the hopes that they go away, but reconsiders later and demands his money back. Eventually he must face down the brothers as well as a Utah porn king (Philip Seymour Hoffman), both of which play out completely unexpectedly.

What links Punch-Drunk Love to There Will Be Blood is Anderson's bleak, unsettling direction. Where Daniel Plainview stood in the middle of a vast nothingness and somehow rose above it, Barry walks down the bright-lit aisles of a grocery store that look so bland compared to the man in the blue suit who travels among them, yet they swallow him whole. Later, when Barry goes to another store to get the cups he needs to get to Hawaii to see Lena, he stands above the aisles, a man now willing to join the world instead of hide within it. The film also calls to mind the surreality of Magnolia with its disorienting backgrounds and its bright color wash. After their first date, Barry takes Lena back to her place, and leaves. When he reaches the lobby, she calls him to invite him back for a kiss, resulting in an amusing bit where Barry roams back through the identical looking hallways before finally stumbling upon the right door.

Sandler's performance may seem like an anomaly for him, but there's always been a violent streak in his comedies: Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, Big Daddy: all feature characters given to violent outbursts, but they're filtered through the ridiculous for humor. Though Barry is just as explosive, Sandler plays him with an isolation that lends itself to both frightening drama and pitch-black comedy.

Punch-Drunk Love isn't on the level of Anderson's two best films, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, but it serves to bridge the two eras of his career while still being a thoroughly entertaining film in its own right. It's the best kind of film: one you don't see coming, and the excellent acting from the two main characters is excellent (PSH steals his scenes as well). It may be just a bit too "arty" in some places, and the harmonium adds little to the story, either literally or symbolically, but this is a surprisingly tender film wrapped in a terrifying black dramedy and a triumph from America's most promising young director.

There Will Be Blood

1898. A man picks at the stone in a deep well, alone, hoping to find silver. Eventually, he falls and breaks his leg and must save himself. Several years later, he runs a small team of drillers and has abandoned silver for oil. In 1911, he runs a fledgling empire. We move through these periods with little diegetic sound, as buzzing violins crescendo over the desert landscapes.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood announces a fascinating new direction for one of the most promising of America's modern directors. I admit that, beloved as Magnolia was, I found it a pretentious, rambling (and not in a fun or insightful way) mess that tried to mix Altman's style of film with Scorsese' type of filmmaking and ended up a hollow masturbatory exercise that called more attention to the camera itself than the objects it captured. However, Boogie Nights remains one of my favorite films, and I keep bumping Punch-Drunk Love farther and farther up my queue until it is, at last, on deck.

Why do I bring this up? Well, this is a blog, so it's only fitting I talk about meaningless personal business, but also because it gives me a certain sense of happiness knowing that, even if I detest Punch-Drunk, I know that PTA never lost it because I've seen this film. Of course, his prior filmography is totally irrelevant, because Anderson tosses out his ensemble casts and surreality in favor of a stark vastness that explores a man as insoluble as Iago, and almost as sinister. It's as if he threw out Altman for Kubrick.

And he succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Anderson still has a certain Scorsesian restlessness with his camera, but he puts it to good use here, moving along the barren lands, zooming in and out, locking into place in moments of minimalistic beauty. With this camera he follows Daniel Plainview, the oil man we meet at the start. Daniel Day-Lewis offers up possibly the finest performance of his career in terms of thematic weight as Plainview (though I'd still side with his Christy Brown in My Left Foot for the sheer effort involved), all the more surprising when you consider how little depth the character has.

That lack of depth threw me a bit at first. I've loved the film ever since I first saw it, but I could never figure out Plainview. At last, after multiple viewings and endless research, I've finally learned that that's the point: Plainview is a man so emotionally guarded and self-absorbed that we are never meant to learn about him. In that respect, it shares more than a little with Citizen Kane, a comparison I've seen in a number of more glowing reviews; like Kane, Plainview forms the nucleus for the story, yet the audience does not and cannot learn all or even most there is to know about the man. Both are character studies whose characters are too complex to be truly studied.



For that reason, the film feels intensely claustrophobic despite its epic visuals. Many, including myself, have compared it to Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: The Space Odyssey, from their use of terrifying glissandi violin movements over a vast setting with sparse dialogue. However, there's a fundamental difference between the two: Kubrick's film dealt, as most of his oeuvre did, with the loss of individuality. Kubrick always strove to reduce the individual to the nothingness he really was, and 2001 was his ultimate (and, funnily enough, his most sentimental) statement on the future of the individual: absorption into the universe and cold machinery, allowing man's evolution. There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, shows us a man who will not be swallowed whole by the space around him, a man who in fact comes to dominate that space.

Plainview regards everything around him as unworthy. Anderson captures the majesty around the character, but Daniel is always the dominant object in the frame. Endless films exist about self-centered anti-heroes, but here at last is true solipsism: if characters are standing damn near right next to Daniel they tend to stand at least slightly out of focus. This is Daniel's film, and it is why we learn so little. Precious few ever really move into focus (and thus into Plainview's limited consideration), and even then they do not always stay there. One is Daniel's son H.W.; when we first see him in adolescence, he stands behind his father in town meetings, seen but not heard, putting a pretty face on a "family business." When an accident at the derrick leaves the boy deaf, Daniel shows genuine compassion towards his son, even if he has even more difficulty showing it. Their relationship eventually crumbles in a flurry of cruelty, but the more I see the film the more I think it's Daniel's way of freeing his son.



Later in the film, a man shows up in the town Plainview has taken over claiming to be his half-brother Henry. After a few stories check out, Daniel surprisingly invites him into his fold, confiding in him more than any other character. In one particularly memorable scene (my favorite, as a matter of fact), Daniel gives us the closest thing we get to a breakthrough when he says to Henry "There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone...I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry... to have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these... people." He's not a man who studied humanity and found nothing worth saving; he started there and moved on to other things. When he learns the truth about Henry, there's genuine pain in Daniel's eyes, not because he feels betrayed but because it means he'll have to remain amongst mortals.

But the most important supporting character is certainly Eli Sunday, played with gusto by Paul Dano. A young Pentecostal preacher, Eli, in a subtle but obvious way, ran the town before Daniel showed up looking for oil on a tip from Eli's twin Paul. Then Daniel shows up and promises the barren town prosperity, black gold and irrigated crops and new buildings, and he sells it all so beautifully I wanted to give him money. The townspeople look to Daniel and Eli as pillars, saviors even: Eli speaks in tongues and "heals" his parishioners, the spiritual savior. Daniel, on the other hand, will bring these people out of hardship through pure capitalism: through him at last comes the capacity to grow grain on their rocky soil and to rebuild rotting shanties into sturdy, beautiful buildings.



The two immediately enter into a battle of wits for supremacy, not of the town, but of the person who dares count himself as an equal. Eli, though certainly a believer, gains power from his status, to the point that I wondered if he considered himself to be the true vessel of the Lord. Daniel establishes his distaste for religion, and for the first time the townspeople have a choice, and it enrages Eli. Over the course of decades the two go about their back and forth: Daniel snubs Eli's offer to bless the well and ignores his initial promise of the $5,000 bonus for Eli's church, and Eli ultimately shames Daniel in front of the congregation. Finally the two reunite in the middle of the Depression, as a broken and bankrupt Eli comes to the still-affluent Daniel to beg for money, and the sadistic delight on Plainview's face is even more disturbing than his wheezing laugh following his speech to Henry.

Why, if this film has no real underlying point, is it so good? Yes, capitalism and religion are both touched upon, and it's possible to draw meaning from the both, but they're chiefly weapons Daniel and Eli use to infuriate one another: Eli exploits Daniel's money-grubbing by forcing him out of 10 grand at the start of the business venture, while Daniel resists any attempt to bring religion anywhere near him or his rig. Some have complained of a lack of female characters, but I agree with it actually; this is a film from Daniel's POV, and it only makes sense that a man so thoroughly cut off from everything would gladly cut out 50% of the world's population on the basis of some anatomical difference. There is one little girl, Mary, who in another film would have been almost central to the proceedings. We meet her when she's about H.W.'s age, and the two grow together, fall in love, and get married. Mary even learns sign language for her beau. But she gets relegated to the background, barely appearing and usually silent when she does turn up, because Daniel simply doesn't care about her.

Perhaps the reason I love the film so dearly is that it so thoroughly plays against type. People label it a Western, and that's not a ridiculous claim, but I find myself increasingly disagreeing with the term; traditional Westerns show us life as it was in the Old West, generally with some romantic, archetypal ideal attached, while revisionist Westerns tend to make some sort of claim about traditional Westerns, a deconstruction of the myth that shows us how life really was. This does neither; the craggy desert is simply a backdrop for a completely inexplicable man who moves through it with such contempt and disregard the setting melts away, and Johnny Greenwood's unsettling score cuts into the pure hatred within. We have anti-heroes and anti-villains. Meet Daniel Plainview: the anti-character.