Boogie Nights (1997)

Before he transforms into Dirk Diggler, Mark Wahlberg stars as Eddie Adams, an enormously endowed high school dropout, nightclub dishwasher, and small-time prostitute who gets discovered by adult film director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). Leaving home after a fight with his mother, Eddie takes up with Jack's stable of cast and crew members, who form a kind of makeshift family that's less dysfunctional—on the surface, and for a time, anyway—than the one he just left. Leading lady Amber Waves (a brilliant Julianne Moore) is the nurturer of the group, and she lovingly tells Eddie what to do—and when and where to do it—when they have their first sex scene together. It's Oedipal and bizarrely touching, as honest as it is non-pejorative. Soon, the newly christened Dirk is the talk of smut society, winning awards and starring in a series of porno-cum-action movies—but perhaps that's too literal—that combine Chuck Norris-style martial arts with the, shall we say, marital arts of John Holmes, whose own tragic life is pilfered for plot points here. As the 1970s go out with a literal bang, and the 1980s usher in an era of excess, both Dirk's career and the tool of his trade go limp under the strains of cocaine. After a blow up with Jack, who has become a stand-in father figure, Dirk sets out on his own, failing as a rock star, participating in a drug deal gone bad that mirrors the infamous Wonderland murders, and ending up right where he started: getting paid a few measly bucks to touch himself while some lonely pervert watches.

And yet this is only the core strand of a multi-character, Robert Altman-esque narrative that prefigures the complexity of Anderson's following film, Magnolia. The personalities that surround Dirk aren't just window dressing; they're convincing as people, with fears and aspirations all their own. John C. Reilly is Dirk's best friend Reed Rothchild, a fellow porn actor and wannabe magician. William H. Macy inspires pity as the tragically cuckolded assistant director who constantly finds his porn star wife in bed—or even out in the driveway, surrounded by onlookers —with other men. Don Cheadle's Buck Swope dresses like Cleavon Little from Blazing Saddles and wants to get out of the porn game for good. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant as a gay boom operator who has a thing for Dirk, and Heather Graham is terrifically brave playing Rollergirl, a porn actress who never removes her skates, and who desperately needs a mom. Rather than handily resorting to stock 1970s stereotypes, Anderson populates Boogie Nights with true characters, convincing oddballs that seem realer than real but stranger than fiction.

The very act of choosing the world of 1970s porno as subject matter may have temporarily earned P.T. Anderson a reputation as an agent provocateur—a label he's since shed with the offbeat comedy Punch Drunk Love and his sophisticated study of greed, There Will Be Blood—but there's nothing mindlessly obscene or gratuitous about Boogie Nights. In fact, the film isn't really about sex any more than There Will Be Blood is about oil. Of course, sex is almost omnipresent, though less as a physical act, and more in the sensual, carefree abandon of the 1970s, a spirit that would morph into an ugly hedonism with the turn of the decade. This is reflected in the changing of the medium on which porn was shot. Burt Reynolds' Jack Horner is somewhat of a porno auteur, and when he explains his credo to the young Eddie, he says that he wants to make a porn film with a story that "just sucks 'em in," so that "when they spurt out that joy juice, they just gotta sit in it. They can't move until they find out how the story ends." Jack may not be an artist or a visionary, but he's got a modest vision nonetheless, to create titillating material that's entertaining and crafted to the best of his ability. And Reynolds—doing some of the best work of his career—plays him, without a hint of winking irony, as a showman who's genuinely enthusiastic about the quality of his product. With the advent of VHS, cheap video cameras, home viewing, and the fast-forward button, however, any pretense at an actual story becomes irrelevant. Enter the age of instant gratification.

As a writer, Anderson handles this cultural shift with deftness, and when his characters begin drowning in the changing tide, he shows an uncommon empathy, withholding judgment and simply letting the various tragedies take place as natural consequences. These are characters that Anderson is rooting for, and we do too, hoping they find some kind of balance between their idealism and the crushing weight of reality. I have conflicted feelings, though, on the arguably forced optimism of the ending, which sees Dirk, as the prodigal son, returning to his surrogate parents and re-forming their bizarre funhouse mirror reflection of a nuclear family. It seems overly machinated and artificial, but it's also oddly satisfying, and I'm glad that Anderson shrewdly avoids the grim death-by-AIDS scenario met by John Holmes and other real-life porn actors in the 1980s. For all that Dirk Diggler is a tragic character, he's also earnest and mostly well- intentioned. When he asks, "Did it look sexy?" after his first scene with Amber, any intimation of cockiness, if that's the right word, is lost in how simply eager to please he appears. And full credit goes to the former Marky Mark. After his turn as a Calvin Klein underwear model, this could've been a disastrously self-parodying role for Mark Wahlberg, but his performance firmly established him as an actor capable of handling complex and challenging material.

Now, about that penis. It's clearly Dirk's guiding compass, a divining rod that leads him from upstart stud to burned-out cokehead, and Anderson treats it like a monster wisely withheld from sight in a horror movie. Just as we only see the reaction of the crow when the witch transforms in Disney's Snow White, Anderson refuses to give us the thing itself, choosing instead to show us the widened eyes of others, their impressed stares, lustful gazes, and jealous looks. Until, that is, the very last shot, when Dirk stands up to see himself in the mirror, unzips his pants, and lets it all hang out in what is perhaps one of the most purposefully underwhelming "money shots" in all of cinema. (It's a prosthesis, by the way.) After all that build up, you'd almost expect Dirk's moneymaker to shoot fireworks or sing show-tunes in Esperanto. But no, it's just a big old floppy human penis—an awkward piece of evolutionary engineering by anyone's estimation—longer than most, sure, but otherwise unremarkable. And that's precisely the point.

One of the best films of the 1990s, Boogie Nights is intelligent, impassioned, and stylistically assured, showing the nascent talent of director P.T. Anderson warming up for even greater feats, like 2007's brilliant There Will Be Blood. Making its Blu-ray debut, the film looks gorgeous in 1080p, and the soundtrack will most definitely get your stereo system pumping, even if you don't have that TK-421 modification, which kicks it up another three to four quads per channel. But that's just technical talk. If you're a fan of the film, you'll want to trade in your DVD copy and pick up this Blu-ray right away. The material isn't for everyone's tastes, however, so for newcomers I'd suggest a rental first. Highly Recommended.