by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
The great Yogi Berra was once hanging out with his Yankee drinking buddies when one of them suggested going to see a porno movie. "C'mon, Yogi," one of them said, "let's go see a dirty movie."
"I don't know," Yogi replied. "Who's in it?"
By their very nature, pornographic movies don't spend a lot of time on character development or acting ability or costumes or, well, anything. Boogie Nights is a real movie, with the goal of showing the audience the personalities and the lives of the otherwise anonymous naked people working in the 1970's pornography industry. It spends time on all of the things that the dirty movies leave out, and its attention to the details of the period and to the development of its characters make it a very watchable and sometimes gripping film.
This is a movie that walks a narrow knife blade. If this was a movie devoted to romanticizing and glamorizing its characters, people would have stayed away in droves. The subject matter is not the stuff of high tragedy, and the characters who populate the film are a little too sleazy to merit overly dramatic treatment. At the same time, it wouldn't have taken much of an effort to turn this script into a piece of comic fluff as insubstantial as Burt Reynolds's hairpiece. The 1970's setting, the sexual content, and the essential dimness of the characters, if handled improperly, could have landed this film into the straight-to-video "Wild Comedy" shelf at Blockbuster. Boogie Nights is a balanced movie, walking the knife blade steadily, and almost without a slip.
The center of the Boogie Nights universe is the San Fernando Valley mansion of stag film director Jack Horner (Reynolds). It's sort of a low-rent Playboy Mansion, complete with string bikinis, a hot tub, a wet bar, and a basement studio where (apparently) all the movies are filmed. And almost everybody we see in the movie is down in that basement at one time or another, running the cameras, checking the lighting, taking off their clothes... it's an odd setup, and could have been interpreted as a hedonist's Valhalla or a moralist's Sodom and Gomorrah. Boogie Nights only works because we get a third perspective: the creative perspective, where the details of lighting and sound and storyline are actually taken seriously by a dedicated team of people who are sincere about their desire to make better dirty movies.
The movie is ostensibly about the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), a young busboy-turned-video matress dancer. Wahlberg does a better acting job than anybody had a right to expect -- unless he's just naturally dim and earnest by nature. If the Dirk character is ever -- for one second -- unlikable, or if the audience ever takes his macho posturing seriously, the movie is doomed. A movie like this is a heavy load for a young, untried actor, but Wahlberg carries the movie like a veteran.
He is aided by a spectacular supporting cast. I'm not convinced that the performances of Julianne Moore and Burt Reynolds are Oscar-caliber, but Moore is sweet and affecting as the earth-mother porn-star Amber Waves, and Reynolds's sleazy charm is made-to-order for his role. Heather Graham is luminous in the thankless role of Rollergirl, whose ever-present rollerskates are one of the movies many sight gags -- speaking of which, William H. Macy's hairstyle and drooping mustache accentuate his brief part as a hangdog assistant director and unloved husband (whose wife has the movie's signature line).
The unsung hero of Boogie Nights is Don Cheadle, best known for his role as a district attorney on TV's Picket Fences. He plays Buck, the only member of the porno crew to have an independent existence outside the industry -- as a low-rent stereo salesman, aspiring to open his own shop with low wholesale prices. He must have done something in a past life to earn the enmity of the costume shop, because they're unmerciful to him, dressing him in everything from Roy Rogers cowboy outfits to a Pat Boone white suit. Neverthess, Cheadle has one scene that defines the movie. He is (for once) dressed in a conservative suit, and is in a bank looking for a loan to open his shop. The bank manager denies Buck's loan application on the grounds that he's a "pornographer".
"It's not fair," says Cheadle, and the great thing about this movie is that we the audience agree with him. We're relating to Buck as a person and not a piece of meat. We know his hopes and ambitions, we know they've been crushed, and we identify with him completely -- just as we identify with Julianne Moore as she loses custody of her son, just as we identify with Burt Reynolds as he's forced to give up his pretentions of being a filmmaker. Without that identification, without that relationship, Boogie Nights would sink like a stone -- but the acting is so good that we're rooting for the characters, even as their worlds come crashing down around them.
Boogie Nights also boasts superb set design and costume work. Having spent the latter part of the 1970s at Lyndon B. Johnson Elementary School in suburban Texas, I am not qualified to judge whether or not director Paul Thomas Anderson has successfully recaptured this era, but it certainly looks that way. The movie looks like a whole squadron of UCLA cultural anthropology students have spent the past twelve months digging through the flea markets and bargain bins of Los Angeles just to find the appropriate Cheryl Tiegs poster to put in Mark Wahlberg's bedroom, or the appropriate 8-track hi-fi for stereo salesman / porn actor Don Cheadle to sell, or the just-right platform shoes and "imported Italian nylon" costumes. By making the audience chuckle at the bell-bottoms and disco balls that abound in Boogie Nights, writer/director Anderson keeps them from taking the story too seriously, and also allows the set design to carry the burden of the humor.
Dirk Diggler tells us that everybody has "one special thing" (his being the size of his manly region, a running joke throughout). Boogie Nights is fortunate to have at least two special things: the excellence of its set design and the quality of its actors. If it's not a great movie, it's an exceptionally well-crafted movie, and these days, that goes a long, long way.
Rating: A
-- Curtis "BlueDuck" Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
The Hollywood Stock Brokerage and Resource http://www.hsbr.org/brokers/blueduck/
"I don't want to study law," she said with the same tone as if she had been saying, "I don't want to turn into a cockroach."
-- Mark Helprin, "A Soldier of the Great War"
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