Boogie Nights ***** (1997, Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds) – Classic Movie Review 272

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 breakthrough movie is a very adult, brilliantly staged epic look at the LA porn scene of the late 70s and early 80s. Epic in scale as well as running time (155 minutes), it is all seen through the eyes of young busboy Eddie Adams, thrillingly played by Mark Wahlberg.

Eddie’s natural charms and unnaturally bulging crotch give him an easy entrée into the sleazy world of adult film director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) and his eccentric entourage. For a while, everything’s great – there’s free love, riches and fame aplenty.

But the rising star that is young Eddie, or rather Dirk Diggler as he’s renamed, falls dramatically and sourly in the boring 80s. Cocaine addiction, crime and changing social mores take their harsh toll on everybody, and the close-knit group disintegrates.

Part vibrant disco-packed escapist retro entertainment, part sobering morality tale, this is a movie of great, fully achieved ambition. Reynolds, Wahlberg and Julianne Moore (as Amber Waves) are all superb in a frank-speaking and stylishly achieved saga that combines humour, sympathy and stark realism in equal amounts.

There were three Oscar nominations, for Reynolds and Moore as Best Supporting Actor and Actress and for Anderson’s Best Original Screenplay, but no wins. It was specially sad Reynolds didn’t win and that the film didn’t revive his career as expected.

Anderson’s first short film in 1988 was The Dirk Diggler Story.

Heather Graham, Luis Guzman, Don Cheadle, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H Macy, Thomas Jane, John C Reilly and Alfred Molina are among the remarkable cast. All of them shine. Hoffman’s role as Scotty J, a shy, overweight, gay boom operator on a pornographic film, was the part that brought him his first renown.

But Wahlberg and Anderson were the main beneficiaries of the film’s success. It showed they could, respectively, head up and helm a big serious, successful movie. Their careers continue to triumph. Anderson’s promise with his debut film Hard Eight in 1996 and Boogie Nights has of course since been amply fulfilled, with Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master and Phantom Thread.

Burt Reynolds was born on 11 February 1936 in Lansing, Michigan.

Burt Reynolds, star of Deliverance, Smokey and the Bandit and Striptease, turned 82 on 11 February 2018.

Tragically, Philip Seymour Hoffman died on February 2 2014, aged 46, from an apparent drug overdose in his New York City apartment. Awarded a Best Actor Oscar for the 2005 film Capote, he checked into rehab in May 2013 for heroin use.

Born in Fairport, New York, in 1967, Hoffman began his career in the early 1990s with a guest role in TV’s Law & Order, but broke through to the movies in 1992 in four films, including Scent of a Woman.

He acted in The Getaway and Nobody’s Fool, and five films for Anderson, Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and The Master, as well as earning acclaim for performances Happiness, Flawless, The Talented Mr Ripley, Red Dragon, Almost Famous and Capote. He was currently filming The Hunger Games: Mockingjay.

http://derekwinnert.com/hard-eight-classic-film-review-316/

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 272

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com/