Another film I saw once upon a time, a long time ago, and have not seen since. It struck me that if there’s a cultural point of reference for Boogie Nights it’s probably Angels in America. (One of the films within a film is called Brock Landers: Angels Live In My Town.) The kaleidoscopic presentation of US history and decline which Anderson presents is no doubt softer in its impact than Kushner’s play, in spite of all the sex. Nevertheless, the film represents an incredibly bold statement by the youthful director, one which took the porn industry and used it as a metaphor for the evolution of US capitalism in a similar way to which Coppola used the Mafia to the same end. Boogie Nights is rangy, overly-ambitious and brilliant. It’s the chronicle of hubris, as Wahlberg’s character rises and falls. What might have been tacky, isn’t. If the film’s ambition sometimes outruns itself, with the last half hour in the eighties lacking the narrative coherence of the rest of the film, this is still a reminder that with strong enough characters, you can get away with overreaching. Creating cinema on the scale of a novel is something few manage to achieve, for all kinds of reasons, many of them to do with the relative costs of producing a minute of cinema compared to a page of a novel, but when a director comes along who can pull off the trick the result is something delirious.
No comments:
Post a Comment