There are a number of movies that, for a wide variety of reasons, I have not seen in full but have seen numerous bits and pieces of. Most of these were movies my ex-wife would find on TV, favorites of hers, always partway through, and then she’d leave them on for a while and I’d end up seeing maybe 65% of the movie and always from the middle, never the beginning, and rarely the end. But the granddaddy of these movies, the movie I’d only seen parts of and as such never really got around to seeing the rest of it, was Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. My undergraduate institution had a TV station that played recent movies, usually stuff that had just come out on VHS, and Boogie Nights was there, but I always seemed to come in in the middle or, in one instance, at the very end of the movie.
HBO Max had it until the end of the month. I figured it was time to plug that hole.
The year is 1977, and high school drop-out Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) catches the eye of X-rated filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). After a fight with his mother, Eddie moves in with Jack and his porn star wife Amber Waves (Julianne Moore). Eddie changes his name to Dirk Diggler and seems to share Jack’s general philosophy that they are making movies and not just something for men to jerk off to. Jack has artistic interests that Eddie/Dirk seems to share. It’s the 70s, and while life isn’t perfect for everyone in Jack’s impromptu family, it’s still something of a family. It’s just this family makes porn. And Dirk, well, he has a special gift that is largely implied until the last shot of the movie when a famous prosthetic is pulled out of Wahlberg’s pants.
However, before that happens, there’s the 80s, symbolically shown to be different in the least subtle way possible when Assistant Director Little Bill (William H Macy) kills his philandering wife, her current lover, and then himself at a New Year’s Eve party. From there, Dirk gets into drugs before going solo with his pal Reed (John C Reilly), Amber gets into a custody battle with her ex-husband, Jack finds his career stalled by a changing audience that isn’t interested in his artistic style of pornography, and Dirk, well, Dirk has real problems. Even Buck (Don Cheadle), a performer whose real passions are country music and stereo equipment, can’t get the money he needs to open his own shop, his own personal dream.
If anything, it makes sense when Dirk, going through his own version of the story of the Prodigal Son, returns to Jack seeking absolution, something Jack readily gives, and the final scene shows the family reunited and seemingly in a good place. If anything, they’re in a better place as Buck gets his shop, Amber and Jack have their surrogate son back, Dirk was scared really straight by a bad experience, and Rollergirl (Heather Graham) is finally getting her GED.
You know, I don’t really know what I was expecting when I finally sat down to watch the movie, but it is very much about the creative experience. Sure, it may look like a nonstop party in the first half of the movie, but the group’s purpose is not so much to get people’s rocks off but to actually tell stories. When they movies change, and arguably the 70s was the one time when porn was almost a respectable form of cinema, then no one is happy, and they end up resorting to drugs and violence. Anderson’s story apparently is based loosely off the biography of the late John Holmes, but probably in the same way Anderson based The Master off the Church of Scientology, so it’s less an accurate retelling and more of a thematic one. The end result is a movie that is less a love letter to the industry so much as it is to the weirdos and oddballs who worked in it.
Grade: A
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