Anderson on the set of Hard Eight, 1997
Anderson on the set of Magnolia, 1999
Anderson working with Robert Altman on the set of Prairie Home Companion, 2006
Anderson with his partner, Maya Rudolph
Biography
for Paul Thomas Anderson - TCM.com Turner Classic Movies
From the debut of
his short film “Coffee and Cigarettes” at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, Paul
Thomas Anderson firmly established himself as an auteur to watch. An ambitious
film that focused on five characters interacting in a Las Vegas diner, “Coffee
and Cigarettes” set the mold for his later films: multiple storylines, dazzling
camerawork and a detailed emphasis on dialogue and character. Anderson was a
brash and gutsy filmmaker who enjoyed tackling big themes - love, hope, family
and redemption, all often combined in biblical fashion - while paradoxically
allowing them to unfold intimately onscreen. Though his first feature-length
movie, “Hard Eight” (1997), failed to connect with audiences and critics,
Anderson planted himself on the Hollywood map for good with “Boogie Nights”
(1997), a surprisingly affectionate, albeit dark, look at the porn industry, as
seen through the eyes of an eager and ambitious rising star. He followed this
breakthrough success with the polarizing ensemble drama, “Magnolia” (1999), and
the wistful romantic drama, “Punch Drunk Love” (2002), both of which
underscored the fact that Anderson was at the top of his game. But with his
Oscar-nominated epic “There Will Be Blood” (2007), Anderson took a giant leap
forward that planted him firmly in the company of Hollywood’s most elite
filmmakers. Anderson’s next several films, religious cult tale “The Master”
(2012), first-ever Thomas Pynchon screen adaptation “Inherent Vice” (2014), and
1950s-set fashion drama “Phantom Thread” (2017), proved Anderson to be one of
the most eclectic and original filmmakers of his generation.
Born on June 26,
1970 in Studio City, CA, Anderson was raised in a showbiz household. His
father, Ernie, was a successful voiceover artist, best known for being the
announcer on “The Love Boat” (ABC, 1977-1986). At nine years old, Anderson
stumbled across his father’s pornographic video tapes, sparking an interest
that later came to fruition later in life. His dad, meanwhile, gave him a
Betamax camera when Anderson was 12, which he used to make amateur films. Never
one to be interested in school, Anderson was forced to leave the upscale
Buckley School after the sixth grade due to fighting and poor grades. He
managed to graduate from Montclair College Prep, only to drop out from Emerson
College after two semesters as an English major. It was during high school,
however, that Anderson made his first substantial film, “The Dirk Diggler
Story” (1988), a 30-minute tale centered on a well-endowed porn star, a la John
Holmes, trying to break into the business; a precursor to what eventually would
become “Boogie Nights.”
After high school,
Anderson spent the better part of two days at New York University where he took
a screenwriting class and subsequently dropped out due to the school’s stodgy
and formulaic approach. Knowing he was going to leave NYU, Anderson submitted
pages from David Mamet’s 1992 crime drama “Hoffa” as a gag, just to see what
would happen. He received a C-minus. Anderson soon returned home to Southern
California, where he began working as a production assistant on a television
game show for kids called “Quiz Kid Challenge” (syndicated, 1990-91). After
meeting actor Philip Baker Hall while working on a PBS special, Anderson
directed the actor in “Coffee and Cigarettes” (1993), a 20-minute short about
five people whose lives suddenly intersect in a Las Vegas diner. Anderson was
admitted to the Director’s Lab at the Sundance Institute, where he expanded on
the short into the feature “Hard Eight” (1997), a crime thriller about a
hard-bitten loser (John C. Reilly) taken under the wing of a pitying small-time
gambler (Hall).
“Hard Eight”
premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 to mainly mixed reviews, thought
Hall was given near-unanimous kudos for his portrayal of an older, wiser
gambler nearing the end of the line. Anderson ran afoul with the studio after
they recut his film without his permission, distributing a movie not in line
with his original vision. Anderson made sure to voice his discontent on several
occasions, telling interviews, “It was the most painful experience I’ve gone
through.” Meanwhile, Anderson went to work on his next filming, writing a
mammoth 300-page script for what ultimately become his breakthrough film,
“Boogie Nights,” an expansion of his 1988 short, “The Dirk Diggler Story.”
Though centered in the world of pornography, “Boogie Nights” was a
coming-of-age story about a San Fernando Valley youth (Mark Wahlberg) with a
rather large member who enters an adult film industry in the midst of
undergoing the transformation from film to video. Under the guidance of
producer and father figure, Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), and actress Amber
Waves (Julianne Moore), the new star - dubbed Dirk Diggler - enjoys enormous
fame, only to suffer a downfall brought about by drug addiction. Well-acted on
all fronts - both Reynolds and Moore earned Oscar nominations – “Boogie Nights”
firmly established Anderson as an auteur on the rise.
Anticipation was
high as to how Anderson would follow “Boogie Nights.” In an almost
unprecedented move, New Line Cinema practically offered him carte blanche,
including the coveted final cut most directors are denied. After meeting idol
Francis Ford Coppola, who told him to use the moment to make whatever he wanted
because it would be his last opportunity, Anderson vaulted headfirst into his
next film. Inspired by the songs of Aimee Mann, he wrote the script for what
became “Magnolia” (1999), a sprawling, engaging and sometimes befuddling look
at several unconnected lives in the San Fernando Valley that collide through
chance, human action and perhaps even divine intervention. Comparisons to
another influence, Robert Altman, were inevitable; Anderson deftly layered
multi-character narratives into a tapestry of near biblical proportions. Once
again using his acting favorites Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, William H.
Macy, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Melora Walters, Anderson
succeeded in delivering an ambitious story about fate and redemption that went
on to earn several award nominations, including three Oscar nods for Best Supporting
Actor (Tom Cruise), Best Original Song (“Save Me” by Aimee Mann) and Best
Original Screenplay.
For his next film,
“Punch Drunk Love” (2002), Anderson managed to keep his loquacious impulses
under control in turning out a taut romantic comedy-drama about Barry (Adam
Sandler), a socially inept small business owner henpecked by his seven
domineering sisters who force him to constantly question his own manhood. In a
moment of loneliness and vulnerability, Barry contacts a phone sex operator who
ultimately threatens to blackmail him. Desperate to do something, Barry enlists
the help of one of his sisters, who fixes him up with one of her coworkers
(Emily Watson). With his emotions going haywire, fluctuating from lust to doubt
to uncontrollable anger, Barry becomes willing to do whatever is necessary to
change and hopefully have a shot at true romance. Anderson specifically wrote
the role of Barry for Sandler; a bold move considering Sandler’s pedigree in
low-brow comedy. Nonetheless, Anderson earned wide critical praise while
winning a Best Director at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. Anderson also
received special kudos for his ability to transform Sandler from frat boy to
sympathetic romantic lead.
While Anderson
firmly established himself as one of Hollywood’s most creatively interesting
filmmakers, no one was prepared for him to make a film with such sprawling
scope and rich texture as “There Will Be Blood” (2007). Loosely adapted from
Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, a sympathetic look at the plight of oilfield workers in
turn-of-the-century California, “Blood” told the tale of Daniel Plainview
(Daniel Day-Lewis), a down-and-out silver prospector who heads out to dusty
Little Boston on a mysterious tip-off that leads to striking a rich vein of
black gold. But in the hardscrabble little town, a charismatic preacher named
Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) stands in the way of Plainview tapping into a lucrative
ocean of oil on the preacher’s land. What ensues is a battle of wills, as both
men struggle to resist the humiliation and deception of the other. “Blood”
stood in stark contrast to Anderson’s previous work, particularly in light of
genre and period. Hailed by many critics as being the best of 2007, the film
went on to earn eight Academy Award nominations and won two: one for Day-Lewis
as Best Actor and the other for Anderson’s long-time collaborator, Robert
Elswit, for Best Cinematography. Meanwhile, Anderson took his time making his
next project, “The Master” (2012), a period drama about a sex-obsessed veteran
(Joaquin Phoenix) struggling to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder and a
postwar world. He eventually meets Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the
leader of a philosophical movement called “The Cause,” and helps him spread his
teachings across the country. While not explicit, the film was considered a
loose interpretation of L. Ron Hubbard’s early days in spreading Scientology,
though Anderson incorporated other elements into his script, including early
drafts of “There Will Be Blood.” Hailed by most critics, “The Master” was yet
another awards contender for Anderson and was among the favorites to receive
nominations at the Academy Awards. Anderson next became the first person to
adapt a novel by the notoriously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon to the screen.
The comedy-drama “Inherent Vice” (2014), based on Pynchon’s 2009 novel,
followed hippie private eye Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) through Los Angeles
at the dawn of the 1970s, with Josh Brolin co-starring as straitlaced police
detective Bigfoot Bjornsen. The elliptical comedy-drama received mixed reviews,
but Anderson scored an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Anderson’s
next film, a drama set in the London fashion scene of the 1950s, was the
original “Phantom Thread” (2017). The film reunited Anderson with Day-Lewis,
who announced during filming that it was going to be his final film.
The
Master? | The Point Magazine Nick Pinkerton, December 15, 2017
Directors don’t have
a consistently identifiable “prime” in the way that, say, boxers do. Film
history offers plenty of instances of late bloomers and early flame-outs.
Inasmuch as we can identify a period of peak power in cineastes, however, it is
when experience has been gained and age hasn’t begun to demand its compromises.
Paul Thomas Anderson has by now entered this period, along with his rough
contemporaries Darren Aronofsky, Wes Anderson and Christopher Nolan, the
Hollywood directors nearest to him in age, clout and aspiration.
If you were in the
process of discovering the world of cinema in the late Nineties, as this author
was, Paul Thomas Anderson was impossible to ignore. His feature debut Hard
Eight (1996), a tightly scripted and modestly scaled genre film, went
largely unnoticed, but follow-up ensemble drama Boogie Nights (1997),
a three-ring circus of show-off camerawork and substance-abuse-fueled seventies
melodrama, couldn’t be missed. A decade on, another period piece, There
Will Be Blood (2007), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as
turn-of-the-last-century wildcatter Daniel Plainview, cemented his reputation
as a major director—the historian and chronicler not only of the fates of
driftless individuals but also of the sad secret life of the United States.
Anderson has never
lacked for ambition—and as with any extravagant artistic undertaking, this has
engendered debate as to if the work is brilliant or Brummagem. Taken together,
his films offer a wide-angle narrative of the twentieth-century American
experience, suffused with popular indigenous themes such as lives of quiet
desperation and beating against the current ceaselessly into the past. This
loftiness of intention is legible not only in the content of an Anderson film,
but also in its form. Even his “small” films like Hard Eight and Punch-Drunk
Love (2002)—the only of his movies shy of two hours—are amped up by
his visual sense and knack for graphic impact. Think of the succinct image of
alienation that opens Punch-Drunk Love: Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan
rammed in the far corner of a widescreen frame, hunched over his desk in a bare
warehouse, a strip of blue paint on a blank wall perfectly matching his boxy
blue suit. Anderson has said that John Sturges’s commentary track on the
LaserDisc of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), the first MGM
production shot in CinemaScope, taught him everything that he knows about film
directing. He favors big and consciously “cinematic” formats, including
wide-gauge 70mm and anamorphic Panavision lenses, and at a time when the
widescreen is often used as an unconsidered default, he is among a handful of
filmmakers who really composes for it. Yet the boldness and sweep of Anderson’s
aesthetic is connected to what can make his films such frustrating experiences.
The talent and imagination are undeniable, and so too is the tiptoe exertion
that accompanies their inevitable reach for the transcendent—a strain we
register as viewers at precisely the moments when we should be feeling the
transcendence itself.
●
Anderson’s American
chronicle expresses an unusual Pacific-leaning bias. California is the
epicenter of the Anderson universe, playing a crucial role in nearly all his
films, with greater Los Angeles given pride of place. (The forthcoming Phantom
Thread, set in London in the Fifties, will be an outlier.) Anderson is
himself a first-generation Californian; his father, Ernie, was a native of
Lynn, Massachusetts who’d been stationed in the Pacific while serving with the
U.S. Navy during World War II—like Joaquin Phoenix’s character Freddie Quell
in The Master (2012). Ernie Anderson made himself a cult star
in Cleveland in the mid-Sixties as Ghoulardi, a beatnik, Van Dyke
beard-sporting late-night horror movie show host who took potshots at the unhip
bedroom community of Parma, Ohio. Then he headed west where he made a modest
fortune as the voice of ABC, raising his family in Studio City in the San
Fernando Valley, something like the Parma of Los Angeles.
Many of Anderson’s
movies exude a fascinated repulsion-attraction towards his home town’s less
scenic precincts, the cityscape that Pauline Kael, reviewing Alex Cox’s Repo
Man in 1984, referred to as “the LA of freeways and off ramps and
squarish pastel-colored buildings that could be anything and could turn into
something else overnight.” Anderson has a marked affinity for retail-operation
showrooms: the “Super Cool” stereo store that Buck (Don Cheadle) dreams of
in Boogie Nights; the furniture wholesaler Solomon & Solomon
(one of many Old Testament references) in Magnolia (1999); the
rival small businesses run by Punch-Drunk Love foils Egan and
Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman), proprietors respectively of a novelty
toilet-plunger concern and D & D Mattress; and the downtown department
store in The Master where Quell has a brief stint as a
portrait photographer. These settings are the backdrops of Anderson’s youth,
reflecting the strong autobiographical bent of his films: the deathbed vigil
over Jason Robards’s cancer-stricken Earl Partridge in Magnolia came
not long after Anderson had witnessed his own father’s slow dying.
With his last
breaths, Partridge confesses, “I let my love go…” as though he might still be
saved. Watching these confessional scenes, I am always struck by the intense
longing to be healed in Anderson’s movies, to be absolved of transgressions and
accepted and reintroduced to the world in a state of holistic wellness. Even
the cynical Plainview is needled into an admission of moral failing, crying out
“I’ve abandoned my boy!” to a heaven he seems for a flickering moment to fear.
Before Barry Egan can accept the love of Emily Watson’s Lena, he must cleanse
himself and confess to the trouble he brought on by calling a phone-sex line,
like Lëvin presenting his diaries to Kitty in Anna Karenina.
Triggering regret is central to the “processing” cross-examination practiced
by The Master’s Lancaster Dodd, who repeatedly poses the question
“Do your past failures bother you?” The same desire to be absolved or cured of
life drives Magnolia’s Aimee Mann sing-along, the chorus of which
chides “It’s not going to stop ’til you wise up”—“it” presumably being the
endless drubbing of existence itself.
Anderson describes
himself as shaped by a casually Catholic upbringing, and in his films ideas
about sin and expiation jostle against his distinctly Californian passion for
the panaceas of personal therapy and self-help. The two perspectives can be
said to meet in the redemptive—if often unfulfilled—potential of personal
relationships. In Hard Eight, Philip Baker Hall’s card-counter
Sydney becomes mentor and protector to John C. Reilly’s hapless John Finnegan
in order, we learn, to redeem past trespasses committed a lifetime ago Back
East. The relationship triangle that develops between Sydney, John and John’s
wife, Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), represents the first of many makeshift
family units in Anderson’s films. Later examples include Julianne Moore’s
coked-up “adoption” of Heather Graham’s “Rollergirl” in Boogie Nights,
Plainview taking on the orphaned son of a deceased prospecting partner in There
Will Be Blood, and foundling Quell’s apprenticeship to Dodd in The
Master. Such restorative attachments are one response to the epidemic of
spiritual hunger and spiritual crisis in Anderson’s American West, where the
promise of Manifest Destiny had trailed off into the sea.
●
Like the uprooted
retirees of Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust,
Anderson’s Californians are those for whom “sunshine isn’t enough.” This air of
stark staring panic is at its thickest in Magnolia, which itself
fairly reeks of desperation, a folly groaning under its own weight, as if made
by someone working frantically to incorporate everything that he has ever
thought or felt, someone who suspects that this might be his last chance to
work on a canvas of such size.
The result is both
too much and not enough. The script’s games of doubling—two dying
television-business veterans with animal surnames, two hysterical women with
drug-abuse issues, two whiz kids of different generations—reflect an active
conceptual intelligence, but at times Magnolia feels like a
baggy omnibus made by filmmakers of wildly varying levels of talent. The
handling of the botched attempted suicide by stricken game-show host Jimmy
Gator (Philip Baker Hall), after facing accusations of molesting his own
daughter, is particularly maladroit, as Anderson recoils from the implications
of his own material. (His cop-out solution is to spare Gator’s life, but withhold
the benediction of the film’s concluding morning-after montage.)
Magnolia has one true inspiration, however, in
the character of Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), who ranks as one of Anderson’s
most indelible creations. Mackey is a teacher of the “Seduce and Destroy”
technique, a sort-of male-supremacist pickup-artist guru seen reciting his
incantations of “Respect the cock and tame the cunt” to a howling seminar
audience of would-be alphas. The character, who Anderson has said was based in
part on Secrets of Speed Seduction Mastery author Ross
Jeffries, appeared some years before terms like “negging” and “kino” entered
popular parlance. (A burlesque scene showing Mackey practicing his art was
lamentably left out of the movie’s final cut—it’s the funniest thing Anderson
has ever shot.) From the perspective of 2017, the creation of Mackey seems
downright clairvoyant. Here we have a standard bearer for men’s rights
activism, complete with “trigger liberal snowflakes” talking points, operating
before his time, in the late, louche Clintonian period.
Such confidence men
play a larger role in Anderson’s movies after Magnolia, as he
focuses less singularly on spiritual hunger and more on those who profit from
it. We see this in Punch-Drunk Love, a transitional film, where
Anderson trades in the emphatic camerawork and long sequence shots of his
Scorsese-aping early movies for a greater emphasis on observed downtime
ambience: the buzz of warehouse fluorescence in the lonely a.m. hours, Barry
Egan’s listless pacing in circles in a half-unpacked apartment that will never
ever be a home. In the antagonistic characters played by Sandler and Hoffman, a
lonesome sad-sack with an anger-management problem and a blackmailing grifter
who preys on the lonely, Anderson hits on the dynamic that has shaped the rest
of his films to date. Plot cedes ground to character, and charge is generated
through the encounter of contrasting opposite numbers—here the passive and
predatory, clumsy and charismatic, victim and bully, naïf and operator.
The strategy is
further developed in There Will Be Blood, a saga of industrial
wealth and entrepreneurial faith. Daniel Day-Lewis’s Plainview is another of
the director’s immediately iconographic protagonists, with his broad-brimmed
hat, bristling dark mustache, and anthracite twinkle in his eyes. No man, it
seems, can stay off Plainview’s list of enemies forever, but he has no foe so
despised as Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a smooth-faced boy preacher who presides
over a small congregation at the Church of the Third Revelation in the
backwater town of Little Boston, California—the name suggesting that the
baggage of New England Puritanism has arrived intact out West.
Eli is based on the
character “Eli Watkins” in the source novel, Upton Sinclair’s Oil!,
which drew on the events of the Teapot Dome scandal, and in particular on the
character of one of its principal players, oilman Edward L. Doheny. The
sobriquet “Sunday” is Anderson’s addition, almost certainly inspired by Billy
Sunday, a former Chicago White Stockings outfielder who retired from baseball
in order to preach the revealed Word and who became the model for the modern
superstar evangelist.
In the film’s
extended 1927-set postscript Eli reveals that he has been attempting to launch
himself as a radio personality somewhat in the style of Aimee Semple McPherson.
The Pentecostal preacher was a figure with whom Anderson was no doubt
familiar—a Los Angeleno legend in her time thanks to the radio broadcast of her
weekly sermons, including episodes of faith healing, from the Angelus Temple in
Echo Park. Eli Sunday joins the ranks of Anderson characters—Frank T.J. Mackey
among them—who seem to spring fully formed from the mythological womb of
American capitalism and evangelism, that matrix which begat the megamillions
and the megachurches.
In The
Master, Anderson turns to a postwar America where he finds not bumptious
triumph culture and liberal consensus, but a landscape dotted with psychically
damaged wanderers, fumbling after a coherent identity following their pyrrhic
victories. Joaquin Phoenix’s Quell is a feckless alcoholic drifter who stumbles
into the orbit of Dodd, a self-styled prophet in the mode of L. Ron Hubbard
during his early years spreading the gospel of what would become Scientology.
Their codependent relationship, an ongoing barter of authenticity and
phoniness, reflects the dynamic at the heart of Scientology as a new American
religion of self-creation; but it also obliquely suggests another postwar cult
that took Hollywood by storm, that of “Method acting” as taught by Lee
Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner. As we watch Dodd coach Quell
through psychic exercises meant to dredge up past traumas, we might well be in
the Actors Studio, with Phoenix consciously summoning the ghost of Montgomery
Clift—the damaged-goods Clift, who’d had his dashed-in face sewn back together
after a drunk-driving accident. Both stars offer full-body performances.
Phoenix’s dark, scraggly Quell, his arms frequently held akimbo, pigeon chest
falling in, a jagged sneer for a grin, a stiff strut that suggests an
improperly wiped ass—a perfect inverse foil to Hoffman’s Dodd, a hale,
flavicomous, overgrown cherub with inscrutable intentions.
A study in
contrasts, these men are also more alike than they know—a point that Anderson
underlines in a scene where they face off in neighboring jail cells, reduced to
a state of animalistic barking. It’s a memorable scene, and indeed Anderson
excels at making standout scenes—though they often have the feel of compartmentalized
units, isolated from any larger construction. This accounts, perhaps, for the
vaguely unsatisfied feeling that his films always leave me with. They exhibit
clearly their creator’s relish in seeing the sparks that result from grinding
antithetical characters against one another, but when the grinding is over
you’re left with a handful of dust.
Parting company for
the last time after a long stint as mentor and protégé, Dodd addresses Quell
with a quietly sung rendition of the romantic standard “(I’d Like to Get You)
On a Slow Boat to China.” Writing in Film Comment at the time
of its release, Kent Jones noted that the The Master “threatens
to come apart at the seams,” but that “the courting of danger is exactly what
makes [Anderson’s] films so exciting.” This left-field burst of homoerotic
serenading is the sort of thing he’s talking about, and such last-minute
gambits are a trademark of Anderson’s films—the most famous being the ending
of Magnolia, a downpour of frogs prophesied by billboards reading
“Exodus 8:2.” Where some see derring-do, however, I find a hint of
desperation—I get the feeling that Anderson, having painted himself into a
corner, is turning to the grand gesture to make his escape. This is, on one
level, entirely appropriate. Desperation is the emotion with which Anderson, as
a dramatist, is most comfortable. These bet-the-house moments, on which he is
prepared to stake the entire integrity of his film, mirror the in extremis
commitments of his damaged characters. Yet some of the exhilaration comes
precisely because the risk of artistic failure is treacherously real. The first
half of There Will Be Blood, an often-silent meditation on the
dirty process of dredging mineral wealth out of flinty ground in mean,
godforsaken country, is one of the most compelling pieces of sustained
filmmaking in Anderson’s oeuvre. But the film’s resolution, with Plainview
cudgeling adversary Sunday into the hereafter, is as disappointing as the first
half’s reveal of Daniel’s embittered core had been beguiling. That Plainview
does his own killing is at least true to the character; he is hands-on in all
his business endeavors. That he should adopt the mantle of preacher (“i am the
third revelation!”) in his final triumph over Sunday, who has turned would-be
entrepreneur, is certainly in keeping with Anderson’s dialectical
screenwriting, in which seemingly antipodal figures reach a state of synthesis.
But the finale feels less dangerous than diagrammatic; like Dodd’s burst into
song at the eleventh hour of The Master, it’s only as moving as the
solution to a formula can be. Both movies are much better in their establishing
chapters, limning out their subjects’ individual psychologies through bold
images that seem to spring naturally from their interior states. (To put
Anderson in the ring with a certifiable cinematic visionary, there are times
when There Will Be Blood approaches the at once elemental and insinuating
quality of Claire Denis’s 1999 Beau Travail, but he has never found an ending
as unexpected and effortless as that film’s frantic dance of self-destruction.)
Inherent Vice (2014) set in Los Angeles circa 1970,
and a capper to Anderson’s chronological trilogy on cultish American creeds,
effectively dissolves any thought of solution in the fabulations of the Human
Potential Movement era. Anderson again here works from his diptych mode: after
the Victim and the Conman, the Capitalist and the Preacher, and the Bum and the
Demagogue, we get the Hippie and the Square—Phoenix’s burner PI Larry “Doc”
Sportello and Josh Brolin’s Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, an LAPD flat-top with
an active Actor’s Guild membership. Both are independently investigating a
missing-persons case involving dirty dealings in Los Angeles real estate, LAPD
malfeasance and a conspiracy between Big Dentistry and the Aryan
Brotherhood—just a few of the cults running rampant alongside the Manson clan
and “Chryskylodon,” an Esalen Institute-esque asylum with drug-cartel ties,
which specializes in reintroducing the dopers they hooked to straight society.
Anderson is
perfectly at home in the Los Angeles of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, readily
adopting its whodunit bones and rumpled romanticism. Inherent Vice, like most
of Anderson’s films, focuses primarily on damaged men—that Emily Watson’s
character in Punch-Drunk Love emerges as anything more than a
cypher is a testament to the actress. This is to be regretted, for Anderson has
filmed scenes of heterosexual coupling distinguished by rare emotional
complexity and intimate detail: notably a draining bout between Vice’s
Sportello and “ex-old lady” Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), and the
first shoot (two senses of the word apply) with Diggler and Moore’s “Amber
Waves” in Boogie Nights. Sportello and Shasta shared their moment together at
the magic hour of the Sixties, but she’s gone over to the straight side now,
and the movie unfolds in the aftermath of the various sub-cults that had seemed
to comprise a spontaneous counterculture having been infiltrated by establishment
powers pushing a religious revival of their own—the Nixonian spin on the old
“return to normalcy.” Sportello’s snooping finally puts him on the trail of
plutocrat puppet master Crocker Fenway (Martin Donovan), a robber baron of a
very different breed than Plainview, one who always keeps his hands clean at
the end of the day.
As a guttural howl
of protest at the owner class reasserting its foot-on-throat dominance, Inherent
Vice isn’t a patch on Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981),
a film that may well have been a source of inspiration, and it never achieves
real comic liftoff. But it does maintain a lovely, lilting, layered tone. It is
Anderson’s most beautiful movie, achieving an abiding air of bittersweetness,
or what he has called a “faded postcard” effect. Watching it, you can
practically smell the funk of hash, patchouli oil and spoiled leftovers. “I
never remember plots in movies, I remember how they make me feel and I remember
emotions and I remember visual things that I’ve seen,” Anderson told a festival
screening audience at the time of Inherent Vice’s release.
The feeling in this
film is that of missed-turn-on-the-freeway melancholy, of having overshot your
desired destination and instead winding up scratching your head in the parking
lot of a sad strip mall and wondering what you did wrong. It’s an attempt to
bottle the essence of that moment when the soft, vulnerable underbelly of the
“All You Need is Love” doctrine got sliced open by Manson, and groovy credulity
crumbled into paranoiac heebie-jeebies. Time marches on, and it’s not going to
stop—the only certainty is that there will be new salesmen, new mantras, new
catchphrases, new palliatives and miracle cures and restorative tonics to
return us to bygone promise, to imagined greatness.
●
The plaintive appeal
of a better yesterday, like the charm of a faded postcard, is felt through many
of Anderson’s films. His is a history of twentieth-century America in a state
of perpetual downfall. In Boogie Nights, an Eden of free sex and
drugs, artistic ambition and the warmth of shot-on-film pornography gives way
to addictive depression, industrialized production and the harshness of the
video eye. The demobbed Quell in The Master is looking for any
port in a storm when he stumbles onto Dodd’s yacht: the landlubber life of an
upstanding civilian on the home front, with its deathly dull domestic
opportunities, has nothing to offer him. Punch-Drunk Love’s play
with the impersonal architecture of the San Fernando Valley, including a gag in
which Barry Egan gets lost in the blank, featureless corridors of his lady
love’s apartment building, suggests the anti-modern Tati of Playtime (1967).
In There Will Be Blood, the single-minded pursuit of lucre makes a
monster of Plainview—though it’s never entirely clear that he had much soul to
lose.
Did America? You’ll
never go broke among the intelligentsia suggesting that our national life is a
hellscape getting hotter all the time, and likely Anderson’s reputation hasn’t
suffered from the fact that his filmography can be read as an extended critique
of consumer capitalism as it has impressed itself onto the American soul,
engendering a sense of longing that can then be taken advantage of by the
predatory quacks, mountebanks and snake-oil salesmen who roam the land. “As
long as American life was something to be escaped from,” goes the winsome
voice-over by Joanna Newsom that runs through Inherent Vice, “the
cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers.” Anderson’s
republic is one of dupes and hucksters, which is how it’s been understood by
such diverse figures as Melville, Twain and P. T. Barnum, and how a great many
of its citizenry understand the social world they inhabit, even while
disagreeing who’s being suckered by whom.
Artists here are held
in as much suspicion as any other class, so it is only appropriate that
Anderson himself should so often be discussed as either sage or charlatan,
though the collected evidence suggests a gifted, fallible filmmaker whose reach
often exceeds his grasp. His career to date reveals a series of uneasy
negotiations between the multiplex and the art house, an attraction to overly
general, even abstract themes, counterbalanced by a lucid attention to detail
in execution. These managed contradictions suggest that he’s working after the
model of John Sturges or George Stevens, those mid-century middlebrow prestige
directors par excellence. (Stevens’s 1956 Giant, for example,
provides a clear model for There Will Be Blood.) Increasingly,
however, after achieving maximum bombast in Magnolia, Anderson can be found
toiling like a sapper to weaken the foundations of his own films, digging into
irrelevant nuance at a scale that can only be described as pompous, writing
obscure lowercase messages on billboard backdrops.
The connections
Anderson has fitfully made with a wide audience may be traced to his working in
a country where a significant portion of the population seems to believe our
best days are behind us, and in a medium whose devotees likewise imagine a
happy past being superseded by a degraded present. Anderson’s own happy past
might be set in seventies New Hollywood. From early on, his ensemble dramas
were likened to those of Robert Altman, while since There Will Be Blood Anderson
has inclined more towards Kubrick, whose shadow lies over Anderson’s generation
as Hitchcock’s did over the previous one. Too fixated on the great to bother
with the merely good, he wears the mantle of national bard, singing sad tidings
of our destiny. Asked for his thoughts on Pynchon’s worldview in a 2014
profile, Anderson mused: “Has America really lived up to its potential? Let’s
keep hoping.” The same may be said for the extraordinary apparatus that is the
film industry in Southern California—and for P. T. Anderson, hometown boy.
Paul
Thomas Anderson - The Los Angeles Review of Books Martin
Woessner, December 23, 2016
LIKE ME, the
esteemed film scholar George Toles thinks that Paul Thomas Anderson didn’t
really come into his own as a director until he made There Will Be
Blood (2007), his fifth feature film. But as I read Toles’s intriguing
new book on Anderson — part of the increasingly influential “Contemporary Film
Directors” series published by the University of Illinois Press — I began to
realize that he and I value the film for very different, perhaps even
incommensurable reasons. A film that had me thinking about history and
geopolitics had him thinking about psychology and personal trauma. What had me
thinking of Walter Benjamin — “there is no document of civilization which is
not at the same time a document of barbarism” — had him thinking about Freud,
and not necessarily the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents,
either.
In Toles’s
account, There Will Be Blood mines “the buried emotional core”
of its ruthlessly single-minded protagonist, the heartless oilman Daniel
Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). For him, the film is an intimate portrait of one
man’s “jammed consciousness.” But I still see it as a broader indictment of the
ideologies that have shaped modern American society as a whole: capitalism,
evangelism, industrialism, and, of course, violence. I want to punch Daniel
Plainview in the face, or put him in prison. Toles wants to put him on the
analyst’s couch. Did he and I see the same film?
Toles views all of
P. T. Anderson’s work as a filmmaker through a psychoanalytic lens. His book —
which, unlike much academic film criticism, is full of literary shine and sparkle
— surveys almost all of Anderson’s cinematic work to date, but it focuses
primarily on three of the director’s later films: Punch-Drunk
Love (2002), the aforementioned There Will Be Blood,
and The Master (2012). Inherent Vice (2014),
an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the same title, arrived in theaters
too recently to make it into the manuscript, which is a shame, partly because
the film challenges some of the assumptions Toles makes about the arc and
coherence of Anderson’s career; but also because a Distinguished Professor of
English who has spent a career working with the filmmaker Guy Maddin — a mad
genius whose films, like Pynchon’s prose, freely mix history, myth, and fantasy
in ever surprising ways — would be just the right person to parse the meaning
of a Pynchon/Anderson mash-up.
If you have ever
seen a Guy Maddin film — some of which Toles either wrote or co-wrote — you
will have a sense of what to expect in Paul Thomas Anderson. Close
attention is paid to psychosexual dynamics, and to how they determine not just
conscious thoughts and actions, but also subconscious drives, desires, and
feelings. Mother figures and father figures loom large, especially in
inescapable fever dreams of memory that shuffle between feelings of guilt and shame
on the one side and euphoric ecstasy — or release, if we want to be more
graphic — on the other. Those long, dark winters in Winnipeg, where Maddin
lives and where Toles teaches at the University of Manitoba, must leave a lot
of time for introspection. Maybe too much time.
Toles thinks that
Anderson’s films simultaneously invite and resist such psychological scrutiny.
He discusses framing and editing and performance, all the usual subjects you
would expect to find in a work of film studies, but what really interests him
is feelings. To get at those feelings, Toles trains his focus on Anderson’s
conflicted characters, whose hearts seem to have been confiscated by some
previous trauma or by the fear of an impending one. Each character becomes a
case study awaiting diagnosis: Punch-Drunk Love’s Barry Egan (Adam
Sandler), who wants to punch people in the face, struggles with a case of
thwarted desire; Daniel Plainview, fleeing his own personal pain, would rather
mine for gold or drill for oil than unearth his own deeply buried, fiercely
guarded personal secrets; and The Master’s Freddie Quell (Joaquin
Phoenix) displays a stunted emotional growth, exacerbated by a fondness for
what today we might call “artisanal moonshine.”
Unavoidably,
Anderson himself comes in for a fair amount of psychological scrutiny, perhaps
because he has, at least in Toles’s opinion, rather obvious mother issues. “One
of the main strands of argument in my book,” Toles writes, “is that Anderson
continues to ‘guard’ the story of his mother,” even as that story “is always
working its way, with obdurate, ghostly force, into his narratives about
fathers (real and surrogate), and carries the real burden of the narrative
mystery.” Oedipus is never too far away.
Fathers, both real
and surrogate, are prominent in Anderson’s early films — Hard
Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), and Magnolia (1999)
— but they are hardly role-model material. The first is a professional gambler
with a wise-guy past, the second is a pornographer, and the last is perhaps the
most questionable of the three: a television producer. (Anderson’s own father
worked in television and radio, mostly as a voiceover artist and disc jockey.)
But mothers, even in their absence, play a powerful role as well, and Toles is
surely right to suggest that these early films are in fact guided by a feminine
sensibility, one that finally gets a voice, literally, in Aimee Mann, whose
plaintive music weaves the disparate storylines of Magnolia together
into a cathartic, emotionally effusive chorus. Whether or not this had to be
done in the style of an extended music video, and with that deluge of frogs to
go with it, is of course another matter entirely. (The less said about those,
maybe, the better.)
It is Anderson’s
post-Magnolia work, though, that fascinates Toles, in part because
it refuses just such “confessional effusion.” It trades Aimee Mann for Jonny
Greenwood; frenetic prolixity for static-charged silence. The “increasingly
taciturn, oblique, and mysterious screenplays” of Punch-Drunk Love, There
Will Be Blood, and The Master exhibit more than anything a
suspicion of the “from-the-gut candor” — to use Anderson’s own words, quoted by
Toles — that animated the early films. There would be no simple cathartic
release here, no refuge in the embrace of a community that recognizes and feels
your pain. In addition, there would be no easy reliance on the comforting
tropes of genre or traditional narrative structure. Viewers would be made to
feel as alienated, as disoriented, as lost as the characters on the screen in
front of them. “Anderson’s plan for the viewer in Punch-Drunk Love”
— a turning point in the filmmaker’s career, Toles thinks — “is to keep him or
her confined in an uncertainty comparable to Barry’s own.” We never know what
to make of this strange, off-kilter film, just as Barry doesn’t know what to do
with the feelings and emotions unleashed by Lena’s (Emily Watson) unexpected
interest in him. And that is precisely the point, because eros —
if you follow this line of thinking — is a kind of “delirious instability.” It
is not so much the glue that keeps one’s world together as it is a sledgehammer
that breaks it apart.
Toles moves from the
“sledgehammer of eros” in Punch-Drunk Love to what we might
call the pickaxe of the soul in There Will Be Blood. What I viewed
as an epic tale of grand historical and possibly even philosophical sweep,
Toles sees as an intimate narrative of failed introspection. Daniel Plainview,
in whom I saw the maniacal face of capitalist greed and bitterness, becomes, in
Toles’s interpretation, a tragic, almost sympathetic character. He is a “a
figure overmastered and done in by an essential stuntedness, and by a vast,
buried hurt. He is too fearful to face up to the latter, so he settles for
lying bluster instead.” Poor guy.
For Toles, There
Will Be Blood is not a film about the origins of the contemporary
world, and all of the blood and oil and menace — both physical and
psychological — that brought it about. That’s too literal an interpretation.
“One feels that the search for oil, this fantastic residue from the far depths,
is an unrecognized search for one’s buried origins, hurt, and attachments,” he
writes. “It is as though the pit must be made to speak in place of lost and
estranged others who cannot, and also be made to speak for the unreachable core
of the man drilling, who is intensely driven but does not know by what.” There
Will Be Blood isn’t about blood at all, apparently: it is about the
search for that “buried emotional core.”
At this point in the
book, oil drilling and mining become a recurrent theme and metaphor. In the
part of it devoted to The Master — a film that swaps mining
camps and oil derricks for naval vessels, but no matter — Toles even likens the
moviegoing experience itself to these processes. It isn’t such a stretch to
imagine our entrance into the darkened theater as a descent into some kind of
cinematic mineshaft, where the dreams and desires of others will be unearthed
before our very eyes. But this isn’t what Toles has in mind, exactly. For him,
cinematic mining is actually self-mining: the pickaxe gets turned the other way
around, especially when it confronts films such as Punch-Drunk
Love or There Will Be Blood or The Master,
which do not conform to established genre expectations. Their form and their
content seem to resist interpretation. Something seems to be missing in these
films, populated as they are by uncommunicative protagonists, and edited in
ways that keep the viewer both temporally and spatially displaced. In these
instances, our hermeneutic blade hits impenetrable bedrock, only to bounce back
and dig into the softer stuff of our own messy souls:
We partly fill in the
gaps with inferences about character psychology, story logic, environment. We
consider how the parts are arranged, notice repeating patterns, and find the
most fitting ways to think about the plot. But mostly it is ourselves (a
roiling mass of feelings and contradictions) that we mine to fill the gaps. It
is our imagining self, our living presence, that seals the cracks and most
powerfully animates the movie picture.
Admirably, Toles
lives by what he preaches, and traces of his own “roiling mass of feelings and
contradictions” can be found scattered throughout his book. His conviction that
Daniel Plainview is a grief-stricken character worthy of our sympathy, for
instance, stems mostly, as he admits, from his own experience of grief at the
loss of his mother not so long ago. We feel another’s pain by drawing upon
memories of our own. But all of this raises the inevitable question: How are we
to know that the feelings we have mined from the depths of our souls or psyches
do justice to the work of art that we are trying to interpret? How do we know
our mining will produce some nugget of interpretive gold?
It has to be said
that Toles is an intrepid cinematic and psychological miner. He finds a great
many gems in Anderson’s films by working carefully, measuredly, over key
sequences in each of them, unearthing insights that less diligent, less
experienced viewers such as I all too easily overlook. And he does it with both
grace and flair. Still, we should remember that mining is dangerous work. The
deeper one digs, the more the dread of eventual collapse mounts; the more one
longs to see the sky again, breathe fresh air.
The opening shot
of The Master may not give us the sky, but it does offer a
whiff of fresh, salty, open-sea air. It transports us to the back of a boat
where we see the ship’s wake churning a beautiful blue-green sea. Our
protagonist this time is a sailor, not an oilman, and he is on a journey — one
that, we soon realize, has no clear, definitive destination. The film, which
seems to jump randomly between various moments in Freddie Quell’s life, from
his time in the Navy to his flirtation with a newly emerging midcentury cult
that seems to have a lot in common with Scientology, does not make it easy for
us to follow his path. But we suspect that we will see that churning sea again
before it’s all over — and we do.
Among the very few
cinematic precedents for Anderson’s work that Toles invokes are the films of
Terrence Malick — especially Days of Heaven (1978). It’s safe
to say that Malick hasn’t come across a body of water or a sky that he didn’t
want to capture on film. Days of Heaven, which was filmed on the
vast prairies of Alberta, Canada, has its fair share of river scenes and
picture-perfect sunsets. But this interest in waterways and skies — if not, in
fact, in the entire natural world itself — is not what Toles thinks Anderson
owes to Malick. Nor is it the work of Malick’s longtime art director and
production designer Jack Fisk, who worked on both There Will Be
Blood and The Master. Instead, it is Malick’s structuring
of Days of Heaven and, 20 years after it, The Thin Red
Line (1998) that seems to have exerted a definitive influence. Both
films exchanged “carefully delineated psychology” for “fragmentary episodes”
that offered little more than “evocative glimpses” of a coherent, dramatic
narrative. Both films resist our expectations concerning character, genre, and
plot. Days of Heaven both is and is not a tragedy; The
Thin Red Line both is and is not a war film.
The same kinds of
things can be said of The Master, of course. It is neither this nor
that in more ways than one. It is full of “fragmentary episodes” and “evocative
glimpses.” Having seen it again recently, at the Museum of the Moving Image, I
still don’t know what to make of it. Surely Toles is right to suggest that the
film is determined “to thwart our desire to get inside its
narrative.” But this doesn’t stop him from trying to do just that. He puts on
his miner’s cap and digs, searching for the film’s meaning, its source. (It’s
worth pointing out here that Freddie’s surname, “Quell,” means just that —
“source” — in German.) The Master may indeed represent, as
Toles suggests, another quest for an “archetypal mother” figure, symbolized
this time around by a mermaid made out of sand that Freddie first ogles, then
humps, and finally cuddles, tenderly. But couldn’t it also be about many other
things as well, including, perhaps, the inability of a certain kind of
Scientology-like psychologizing — “The Cause,” as it is called in the film — to
unlock the secrets of such a confounding, enigmatic, tight-lipped character?
The founder of “The
Cause,” Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is the embodiment of
intellectual bravado — “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, and a theoretical
philosopher” he declares at one point — who tries as best he can to quell
Freddie Quell, to cure him of his corporeal animality, which gets expressed in
all manner of physical outbursts, many of them violent and self-destructive. In
Toles’s analysis, the sex that Freddie finally has — with a woman not made of
sand, it is worth pointing out — represents not just a release but also a kind
of redemption. But it is unclear if this redemption results from Freddie’s
embrace of “The Cause” or his rejection of it; if it shows him having been
mastered, or having become his own master. Either way we read it, though, the
scene certainly stands in stark contrast to the vicious, visceral, decidedly
unambiguous ending of There Will Be Blood. (Such a giveaway, that
title.) Maybe it proves Toles right. There won’t always be blood, I guess, but
there will always be feelings. On that we can agree.
List of films
reviewed:
Boogie Nights 1997
Magnolia 1999
Punch-Drunk
Love 2002
There
Will Be Blood 2007
The Master 2012
Inherent
Vice 2014
Phantom
Thread 2017
Anderson has no wife.
ReplyDeleteI stand corrected. Thanks.
Delete