28 June 2003
(This is a two-part series. The other part is about Wes Anderson.)
Now I’m not going to enter into a debate about Kevin Smith; I didn’t even know about all that until the ‘MagnoliaFan’ bit in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back . All I’ll say is that Kevin Smith is not a director, and he’s not a particularly good writer.
Paul Thomas Anderson, on the other hand, is up there with modern greats like the Coen brothers, Julio Medem, and Miyazaki. He’s like Iain Banks, in a way: almost obscenely talented, making the incredible seem effortless, but with a tendency to try to be too clever. I’m a harsh rater on the IMDb — I thoroughly enjoyed watching Sleepy Hollow , so it got a six — but Anderson’s yet to receive anything less than an eight.
I said before that Wes Anderson was adept at creating soundtracks that sound like cool compilations CDs (or tapes). So’s Paul Thomas Anderson, but he’s even better at blending them with the film. This is true to the extent that it’s debatable whether he’s blending the soundtrack with the film, or the film with the soundtrack.
Also like Wes Anderson, he has a solid core of high-quality regulars, only his are better and more numerous. Luis Guzmán, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, and Julianne Moore are all excellent actors. As for Phillip Seymour Hoffman, well, he is possibly the best male actor working in film at present.
Before I start rambling about why Phillip Seymour Hoffman is so great, let’s take a look at Anderson’s films. (I’ve not seen Sydney , so I can’t comment on that.)
Eddie’s working in a night club in the San Fernando Valley when he’s ‘discovered’ by Rick Horner, an adult film director. Changing his name to Dirk Diggler, he and Horner take the porn world by storm; Diggler’s a consummate professional, coming up with new ideas, and Horner wants to make adult films be film as well as adult. But this isn’t about two men, it’s about a ‘family’ of people in the industry. For the first half of the film, everything seems to be going well, and then there’s the downside. Diggler gets past it, then loses it, and the family group fragments.
Up until then, I was liking it but not seeing anything special there. There was a good sense of time and place, and the characters were sympathetic, but it was all a bit soft, with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and William H. Macy playing the only characters who seemed to have any form of self-doubt. But then there are shootings, and too many drugs, and a failed musical career (actually, this was incredibly funny — imagine if Dirk Diggler had been on the Transformers: The Movie soundtrack). Without each other, everyone becomes lost. This darker second half improves the film immensely: all the good bits from the first half are there, but the characters are now struggling and unhappy.
Take Boogie Nights. Remove the porn but keep the location. Transplant to the modern day. Add a sprinkling of unworkable and tighten the timeframe so that the events in the film take place in a single day. Then you’ll be some way to describing Magnolia, with a plot that sprawls over three hours and concerns a group of interconnected stories about people in the San Fernando Valley. These people just happen to be played by all the regulars listed above, with the additions of Phillip Baker Hall, Melora Walters, Jason Robards, and Tom Cruise in the finest performance of his career, magnetic, intense, and disturbing.
Despite its length, the film is headed for its conclusion from the off. The first hour sets up the characters, the second keeps things moving at a steady pace, and the third unleashes two outlandish scenes that should not be as effective as they are. It says something that the less-contrived of these has the various ‘leads,’ each in a state of despair, singing Wise Up by Aimee Mann (from Bachelor No. 2, which is a pretty good listen). Of course, this also happens to be an astoundingly good scene, the best in the film. It’s one of those set pieces that really sticks with you.
Picking a standout performance from this selection is nigh on impossible. William H. Macy has perhaps the toughest role as Quiz Kid Donnie Smith, who’s the least connected of the major characters.
Much tighter in focus than either Magnolia or Boogie Nights, but still in that valley. At the beginning it’s tough to watch, and didn’t get any easier for me second time around. The story is somewhat off-kilter: Barry Egan is an unhappy man with seven sisters who runs his own business selling ‘fungers’ (novelty plungers). He bottles his emotions up and so is liable to explode. One of his sisters introduces him to the beautiful but definitely odd Lena, and so he attempts a romance with her. This is hampered by the arrival of a harmonium on the pavement (yes…) and an ill-advised call to a phone sex line, the operators of which then try to extort money from him, using four blonde brothers as muscle. Oh, and he’s also busy collecting a million Frequent Flier Miles from a pudding promotion, even though he doesn’t like travelling.
Got all that? Good. If you didn’t, then it’s a romantic comedy that’s more offbeat than likely anything you’ve seen before.
The important thing about this film, that quite a lot of people seem to fail to pick up on, is that our couple are damaged. Adam Sandler’s films have always had that ‘no, it’s not funny, it’s wrong’ violence that some people love, couched in puerile jokes and predictable storylines. Take his characters out of that context and the character is exposed for what he is.
That’s true for everything in Punch-Drunk Love. Barry Egan’s always wearing a blue suit, which we’re told is uncharacteristic. All throughout the film, characters ask him why he’s wearing it, and he doesn’t know.
To add to this, the soundtrack is cranked up a notch too high for comfort, there are a lot of bright, contrasting colours, and there are frequent musical interludes with shifting colour blends the only thing on the screen. But it’s bloody fantastic, the best film of the year so far.