When the days were orange and the nights were also orange
A Retrospective on Paul Thomas Anderson
They say when you die, you’ll be guided comfortably through the Pearly Gates and into the Kingdom of Heaven by all of your relatives, friends, goldfish, and succulents who have pre-deceased you. It’s warm, it’s comforting. All the pain and sorrow you carried with you through life is gone.
Hell is a little different. If you’re one of the unlucky bastards who liked the sulfurous taste of sin a little too much, odds are you’ll be dragged ass-first over hot coals and then kicked in the balls by all your ex-girlfriends before being slotted into a routine squeezing orange juice with a papercut as penance for all eternity.
But then, there’s purgatory. Purgatory is watching the films of Paul Thomas Anderson.
The Man
Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA, a moniker given to him by people who don’t have elementary schoolers) grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a Midwestern radio talent named Ernie (as if you can be anything other than a radio talent if your name is Ernie). He grew up like a lot of directors, making simple films with his friends on rudimentary film equipment. The Rhinestone West of his childhood would go on to feature prominently in all of his movies as an almost New-York-in-Sex-and-the-City-style Place-as-Character. To date, only one of his films, Phantom Thread, does not take place, even a little, in the Western United States.
At 18, he makes the short film The Dirk Diggler Story, which will, of course, go on to become Inherent Vice, I mean, Boogie Nights. Like a lot of people who have ambitions of doing something creative, I can’t help but compare myself to a lot of these guys, the ingenues, the whiz kids, who make classics when they’re barely out of diapers. Stephen King famously wrote Carrie when he was twenty-six (sheesh), Sam Raimi made Evil Dead when he was twenty (sheesh), and Paul Thomas Anderson made Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia all by the time he was thirty (sheesh). Obviously this is an impossible goal post—none of us should hold ourselves to the standards set by people who are unnaturally talented and lucky. (Would Sam Raimi have become Sam Raimi if his childhood best friend wasn’t movie star handsome AND a human crash test dummy?)
Anyway, one of the many things I find very endearing about PTA is his experience with film school, told here. Basically, day 1 at NYU, his professor bad-mouthed Terminator 2 (strike one) and day 2 returned PTA’s homework assignment with a C- (strike two). His homework assignment, of course, having been lifted directly from an unproduced David Mamet script. So, rather than wait for a third strike, he dropped out and opted for a “film school” that was the same as his indie contemporaries: making a short film and submitting it to Sundance.
Worth noting here as some historical context that PTA comes up at the same time as about half a dozen other directors who turn independent filmmaking into a real industry. The big ones of course being Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, and Richard Linklater. So, basically, the conditions were perfect for a guy with directorial ambitions to make a name for himself in indie filmmaking.
The Films
Just to get it out of the way, here’s my ranking:
Magnolia
There Will Be Blood
Boogie Nights
Phantom Thread
Hard Eight
The Master
Licorice Pizza
Inherent Vice
Punch-Drunk Love
I would write entire reviews of his movies, but I think that would get a little repetitive, especially toward the back of this list. This is more about his whole body of work and the feelings that it evokes. See, PTA, unlike Spielberg or Scorsese, does not really have “major” or “minor” works. They are all, in one way or another, significant to his identity and his career in a way that The Lost World is not significant to Spielberg’s identity and Boxcar Bertha isn’t to Scorsese.
By and large, PTA’s films can be split into two camps: Something to Prove and One of the Boys.
Something to Prove
PTA’s pre-2000 work is brilliant. It is the work of a fresh voice, with a fresh eye and a fresh way of getting actors to pop on screen. His work is so novel, the way that Tarantino’s dialogue in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction sounds like how Rubber Soul must have sounded in 1965.
In Hard Eight (1996) PTA works with a fresh John C. Reilly (one of the great living actors) and now old mainstays Samuel L. Jackson and Philip Baker Hall, he crafts a narrative that he’d revisit on a larger scale in There Will Be Blood: the rise and fall of a greedy sonuvabitch. But, in this sort of first-feature Bottle Rocket-flop way, Hard Eight has fallen to the dustbin. Very few people, even PTA acolytes, will list it among his best movies. I certainly think it is.
Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) see Anderson at the height of his abilities as a director. These are also the last times he made great films, on purpose, without a personal agenda. Both of these movies you could read, and as a vulgar auteurist I choose to, as movies that reveal something about the artist. Boogie Nights is about the ingenue, the whiz kid. Someone who explodes onto the scene and earns the respect of the old guard (here, a late career haymaker from Burt Reynolds, whose thoughts on this movie are pretty funny). It’s a movie so suffused with self-doubt that it’s endearing and heartfelt. You feel for this guy. It’s made with so much pain and so much anger at not being great in an absolute value sort of way, but being great for your age. Magnolia, Anderson’s bona fide masterpiece, brings this to a whole other level. He stares down the barrel of old age. Its terror. Its fear. The frenetic editing here gets me choked up, anxious as someone who’s worried that life will pass them by. It is also the first in a duology, with Punch-Drunk Love, of films that have been described to me as being as close a visual representation of the feeling of being on cocaine. Magnolia, the high, Punch-Drunk Love, the crash.
Anderson also makes a name for himself early in his career as someone great at eliciting great performances. Julianne Moore and Burt Reynolds both receive their first Oscar nominations for Boogie Nights. But, in this era, perhaps his greatest feat as a director-of-actors, is Tom Cruise in Magnolia. To date, perhaps Cruise’s best performance (alongside another 1999 release Eyes Wide Shut) and only real excursion he takes into character actordom. I encourage anybody who’s interested to look into Cruise’s relationship with his father and how cathartic this movie was for him.
His early films are so brilliant. And I say this not to discount what I’m going to talk about later, but to underscore that I think Paul Thomas Anderson is a phenomenally talented and intuitive director. He’s a director who cares about his subjects. He cares about his actors. He cares about the way things look and the pathos its meant to evoke. And I just wish he’d go back to just doing that, instead of what we get from him later in his career. In a way, it’s a cautionary tale about growing older. Once your hair starts to gray and your age begins with a 3 instead of a 2, people stop listening to what you have to say. You have to suddenly fight to be regarded as great, not just a sideshow and great for your age.
The Wilderness Years
So, when I settled on my framing device, I found that there was one movie in his filmography that didn’t fit neatly into either category. He’s not a young person trying to make a name for himself and he’s not quite one of the boys yet. It’s one movie that exists outside his filmography thematically and tonally. It’s There Will Be Blood (2007).
There Will Be Blood begins PTA’s career-long flirting with becoming the Greatest Director to Ever Live (GDEL). And to do that, first, he needed to create his Transcendent Masterpiece, a.k.a., his Greatest Movie Ever Made. His heroes all have one. Coppola has The Godfather I & II, Scorsese has [Data set too large to display]. After all, Anderson is staring down the barrel of 40, and by the time, say, Spielberg was that age, he’d made Jaws, Close Encounters, the first two Indiana Jones, and E.T. (Sheesh). Time was ticking if he wanted to be on the same pace as his heroes.
There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece. A sprawling epic about an oil man (played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who would go on to win an Oscar for the role) in the early 20th Century at odds with the local religious yokel population led by Paul Dano (who would go on to be shut out at the Oscars for the next 20 years despite being one of the best actors of his generation). It’s a movie about avarice, God, the American Dream, fame, original sin, community vs. individuality, I could go on forever. It’s about everything. But there’s the rub: it’s about everything.
PTA thought he could create The Movie. The movie that would answer every question about America, satirize everything, critique everything, and change cinema forever. It would hold up a mirror and force the Whore America to stare at itself and contemplate its history and usher in a new era such that the history books would look back on 2007 as a hinge point in American history, driven by Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnum opus.
Making a magnificent movie is not a bad thing, not at all. It’s just that There Will Be Blood, feels, in its mana, like someone was not trying to create a great movie. They were trying, explicitly, to create the greatest movie ever made. The Godfather films, Citizen Kane, Vertigo, the whole canon of critically-considered Greatests, do not have this issue. It is the work of a director who is beginning to become a little too big for his britches.
There Will Be Blood is a hard-to-pin-down movie. I love it, but its whole reason for being feels fraudulent and winking. It feels like a job application. Or like the director is trying to get into a secret society. Or like he’s fishing for his “I’ve arrived” Oscar statuette (“Oscar Bait” this and “Oscar Bait” that, sometimes movies do serve that purpose—they define an artist’s career). It is a movie meant to showcase the artist’s brilliance, and nothing more.
One of the boys
When There Will Be Blood was released, that was PTA’s ascension moment. He arrived. For the rest of his career, he would be the guy that made There Will Be Blood. That comes with a few perks. One is money. He gets his blank check for the rest of his life. Another is name recognition. His movies are now “event films” in the way that a new Scorsese or Spielberg causes tremors online and in the trades.
(Punch-Drunk Love has not been forgotten, don’t worry. See, it fits nicely in his post-TWBB filmography but has the unfortunate quality of having been released prior to TWBB. Regardless, here it goes. PDL is an immature work by an immature artist. It is the first sign that PTA does not “have it” and the first sign that maybe he has nothing to say. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is his film with the smallest scope. Often, he can hide the total lack of affect in his films with sweeping scores and beautiful Magic Hour photography. However, PDL is a brutish piece of autofiction written by somebody who feels like his life is collapsing due to his (alleged) drug addiction and an (alleged) tumultuous relationship with Fiona Apple. It is a movie where all bad behavior is rewarded by the narrative in this act of perverse wish-fulfillment. It is not a good movie.)
The rest of PTA’s filmography is PTA at his worst: a hack trying to recapture the success of his youth, the energy of his youth, and the acclaim of his youth, while simultaneously trying to etch his way onto Mount Rushmore as a Great Adult Filmmaker. He wants to shake off the ingenue stink.
His first whiff at doing this is The Master (2012). A film about Joaquin Phoenix’s shell-shocked pedophile Freddie Quell ingratiating himself into a Not-Scientology Scientology surrogate “The Cause.” It is a beautifully-shot movie, using the crutch of that specific film stock that will come to define the rest of Anderson’s career. See, it telegraphs what will end up being the issue with the rest of his films: Beauty without Pathos.
None of the rest of his films (with one exception, which I will detail later) contain a single character worth rooting for. Sure, lesser directors than PTA have written and developed unsympathetic characters and ingratiated them to the viewer through great writing. However great the writing is in PTA’s films, all of that goes out the window when put to celluloid as PTA cannot help but make himself the main character of all of his films. All of his films beg to be viewed as complete works of art (all films are like this, certainly. What I mean is that Anderson uses his films as a reflection of his own artistry, not allowing other aspects of the filmmaking, whether it be the cinematography, acting, or editing, to transcend the confines of what would make the director look good. All films are collaborations towards a whole led by the director. PTA’s films feel, to me, like products generated by the director to reflect positively on him and only him), all meticulously put together by The Director, the mythological figure molding the final product with the precision of a sleight of hand magician. Every great performance in a PTA film (of which there are many, don’t get me wrong) is meant to elevate Him. They exist within the film. PTA never lets them transcend to Greatness. Partially, that’s what makes There Will Be Blood so great. He allows Daniel Day-Lewis to transcend into becoming one of the canon all-time-great performances. He never allows his actors outside of DDL to do the same. Which is why actors are always great in his films, but never Great, if that makes sense.
Part of that may be a lingering desire for realism. He wants his films to be raw and gritty. Like he’s trying to recapture the once in a lifetime raw and emotional scene where Tom Cruise cries over his dying father in Magnolia. There’s a certain realness that prevents these great actors from reaching their full potential. And it’s a selfish impulse. I think PTA knows that if he allowed Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master or Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice to act to their full potential, it would eclipse the greatness of the final product that he is creating (both of these are great performances. But neither feel, to me, like either actor is reaching to a new height the way they do in other performances). I think it’s what drew him to casting untested actors Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman to lead Licorice Pizza.
Certainly, this is an ungenerous read. But feeling this way (totally lacking any emotional connection to any of his films after 2000) speaks to a trend. See, I don’t think that this is a deliberate choice that PTA is making. I think he sets out to create genuinely great films every time he puts pen to paper (and his critics certainly agree with that greatness). But, I think it speaks to a certain pathology that pervades throughout his films. One of insecurity and of frustration.
In the 90s, PTA was a whiz kid. Maybe THE whiz kid. He made three films back to back that wowed audiences and critics alike. They thought, wow, this kid is great. Maybe he’ll ascend to being one of the great filmmakers of all time one day. And then that thought wormed its way into his head. Now, he has to create sweeping and emotional epics within stories that do not lend themselves to that plotting. Licorice Pizza feels overlong and half-baked. The Master feels slimy and mean-spirited. Inherent Vice, though adapted from a novel by perhaps the greatest living American novelist, feels cheap and hollow. All to trick himself and his audience that what he’s making are Great Films.
His later career films belie a filmmaker too concerned with making the greatest films of their respective decades, thereby making him one of the greatest living filmmakers. They are insecure and unsure works of art made by a man with a teenager’s maladaptive personality (does everyone else like me?). It makes what I’m about to say even worse.
One of the greatest films of its decade
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017) is one of the greatest films of its decade. It has PTA getting back together with his last Oscar Winner, Daniel Day-Lewis, to create the perfect Paul Thomas Anderson film.
See, the subject of Phantom Thread is perfect for a PTA production. It is a movie about a creator, the director surrogate, making beautiful works of art all the while being a foppish and charmless and exacting prick, alienating everyone he loves and everyone who loves him, including his audience. Gradually, the film wears Reynolds Woodcock down (through some of the great Cooking Cinematography ever put to celluloid—I don’t care if it’s poisoned, I WANT that omelet), until he is finally capable of feeling and showing love.
Some of the greatest shots of the 2010s are in this film, including the famous shot of Reynolds and Alma (played perfectly, not just perfectly for a PTA production, by Vicky Krieps) dancing on New Year’s Eve.
Phantom Thread is a film about PTA making movies. He is a foppish, charmless, and exacting prick. BUT, he also makes works of art that look beautiful. That contain all of the bits and bobbles that sum total to being a great work. In that very narrow way, Phantom Thread may be PTA’s magnum opus. A rare work of introspection. A self-effacing comedy where he is the butt of the joke. An angry treatise about how the rest of the world doesn’t get him. And I so wish he would continue making movies like this.
At the end of the day
At the end of the day, I think Paul Thomas Anderson is a great director. Not a Great Director, but a great director. I think he makes movies that are good on face value but don’t beg for you to reach any deeper. I wish, deep down, that he would stop trying to reach the highs of his early career and be somebody that he is not. Only madness lies that way. His best work post-Magnolia has been when he’s eschewed his own conventions and made honest work about himself and the world as he sees it. And that’s the makings of a great artist. Bones and all.