City Cinema: Boogie Nights

Drama, Comedy. 18A. Severe nudity and sex, violence.
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson, US, 1997, 153 min.
Mark Wahlberg, Burt Renolds, Julianne Moore.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic portrait of the United States of America at a turning point in its visual history. Spanning the late ’70s and early ’80s, Boogie Nights follows the exploits of a hardcore adult film outfit, and especially its most famous star, from the troupe’s magical beginnings, through its meteoric rise, and to its inevitable decline and fall. The various stories and characters within the film point to larger, grander philosophical ideas about society’s self-perception. And thanks to the cinematography from Robert Elswit – it’s pulled off with brilliant visual style. Mark Wahlberg turns in the performance of a lifetime as a well-endowed bus boy pulled into the world of porn and renamed Dirk Diggler. While Burt Reynolds plays a producer who believes the adult film can be made into an art form that can both titillate and entertain. Boogie Nights covers a lot of ground but underneath the bell-bottoms, X-rated shots, and lines of crystal meth is a powerful, incisive exploration of what happened to decent people when the greedy ’80s took control.