Boogie Nights (1997) * * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Ecstatic and elegiac mini-saga of a slice of time in the porn industry. Fascinating, and not just voyeuristically.
I love movies that dive into a universe of their own and examine it exhaustively. There's a short but growing list of American movies that work like that, which Roger Ebert once called "experimental epics": THE GODFATHER, THE RIGHT STUFF, GOODFELLAS, NASHVILLE.
Now add BOOGIE NIGHTS to the list --a funny, enthralling movie about what many people might not think to be a compelling subject -- the birth of the American porn-movie industry as we now know it. But it's not a chronology; it's about how things felt at the time, about a sense of community and shared life, both good and bad. It's also not sensationalistic or sleazy -- two ways this movie could have collapsed in on itself. It's an intelligent and knowing movie that seems to have been put together with a fair amount of insider knowledge. (I had a friend who worked in a low-rent porn magazine for some time, and I imagined him nodding furiously in agreement to a lot of what appeared on screen.)
BOOGIE NIGHTS gives us Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds, in a role that shows he can play more than beer-drinking good ol' boys), director of "exotic, adult films". He catches sight of a gangly seventeen-year-old, Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), bussing tables in a nightclub, and heads back into the kitchen to talk to him. Adams unblinkingly thinks he's being picked up by a gay man, and responds appropriately: "It's five bucks if you just want to look at it. Ten if you want to watch me jerk off." Curiously, this scene -- which is perfectly observed and played out -- sets a pattern for the movie: Sex is business, and business happens to be damned good.
Horner is gentle and empathic, and offers to put Adams into his movies. Adams cheerfully agrees, and soon tosses over his wretched life with his mother (a frightening Joanna Gleason). Sure enough, the kid's a natural, and after a very funny name-change / re-christening in a hot tub ("Dirk Diggler"), he's in one top-flight porn production after another. He's having fun, and is enjoying the admiration he gets over his outsized talents. (One of the single funniest moments in any movie this year comes here, when The Colonel asks Diggler to whip it out for inspection; the shot is played entirely off of The Colonel's face and is all the funnier for it.)
What is best about the movie is the way it portrays the porn-film crew as an extended family. There's Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), Horner's beau and major female lead "actress", who mothers and pampers Dirk unceasingly -- almost certainly as a substitute for her own son. (One truly agonizing scene has a trying and failing to regain custody of the boy.) Little Bill, the lighting director (William H. Macy) and Kurt Longjohn, the cinematographer (Ricky Jay) take their work seriously; they like making movies, even if they're "dirty" movies. Rollergirl (Heather Graham), a high-school dropout, gives Dirk his first crash course in on-camera sex -- and whose apparently unremovable roller skates become her other on-screen trademark. Scotty (Philip Hoffman), the gaffer, has a confused, possibly homosexual attraction to Dirk that more likely stems out of his sense of being sidelined in the middle of the action. Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), Dirk's co-star in a series of Bond-style spoof porn flicks, also becomes his confederate and close friend; instead of the predictable one-upsmanship and jealousy, there's a sense that they've toughed it out together. They make a nice team. And Buck Swope (Don Cheadle) is the one member of the porn crew who tries to go back to the real world and re-open a stereo store, with hilarious and unnerving results.
Then there are the people who wander into this circle and make life tougher. Philip Baker Hall shows up as Floyd Gondolli, a "connections man" who tries t convince Horner of the future of porn: "Videotape." (Unfortunately, Horner takes a lot of convincing.) The Colonel (Robert Ridgeley), Horner's main connection, winds up getting busted for messnig with an underage girl. Pushers, creeps, and drug-crazed weirdos begin to hang around in the corners, pop out of the woodwork, and it isn't long before Diggler himself is a coked- up mess. One truly saddening sequence has him trying to prime himself for a scene, only to discover that his major asset isn't on its best behavior that day.
Porn in the Seventies was once considered a halfway artistic and serious venture, and there's a sense of how that could be true in BOOGIE NIGHTS. Horner has one great scene about how to keep people in their seats (even after they've probably got no reason to say). And for a while we sense how that's possible as well, but the bubble is slowly disintegrating around them, and soon Diggler and his friends are trying to pull off a drug burn that could get them either very killed or sorta rich.
The acting is superb, and depends on more than a little typecasting. Despite many familiar faces, even "stars" like Wahlberg and Reynolds relax and let the material absorb them. They're not only credible, they seem almost familiar. The movie also never stops for breath. Two and a half hours feel like half that length -- it's amazing how much character and drama and information we get, all of it incredibly absorbing.
The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, also did the memorable HARD EIGHT, which was unjustly relegated to video and deserves to be seen by anyone reading this review. Now BOOGIE NIGHTS, which is a giant quantum leap of moviemaking for a 27-year-old director. This was one of the best movies of 1997, hands down.
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