The Perverse, Tender Worlds of Paul Thomas Anderson
What is the sound of a needle entering fabric? Something more significant, it seems, than the sound of one hand clapping. You hear a tiny pop followed by the rustle of violated muslin—a shudder in the silence of the universe. Scrupulous directors make sure that the sound of their movies is grossly efficient, so that the dramatic meaning of a scene is apparent even in the worst theatre or home system in the country. They also layer in, for those who care about such things, a secondary level of sound—think of the swishing skirts in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.” In “Phantom Thread” (2017)—the needle-and-fabric movie—the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, uses such details to build an exquisitely perceptible epic of minute events. The film is devoted to couture in mid-fifties London, a period of heavy, draped, self-conscious luxury. The style-setter in this milieu is Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), a designer of genius who is also an infantile narcissist. Reynolds must control every aspect of his life or fall into despair. At breakfast, his working-class mistress (Vicky Krieps) audibly butters her toast, and he acts as if the day has been lost to him. Excruciation is the movie’s dominant emotional mode—not pain but nerves drawn to the breaking point. The struggle between the man and woman is fierce. Anderson surprises us: Reynolds’s mistress, initially passive, employs stealth and guile and becomes her master’s master.
Some moviegoers found “Phantom Thread” almost suffocating in its concentrated hush. It is suffocating, but how could Anderson have dramatized the madness of a control freak’s world without re-creating its atmosphere, its denatured sensual décor? Whatever his subject, in big noisy movies (“Magnolia,” “There Will Be Blood”) and smaller, quieter ones (“Phantom Thread,” “The Master”), Anderson plunges us into the physical realization of experience with a thoroughness that can be unsettling. He commands the medium, overloads it, teases and challenges us. He can also be a little baffling, putting more on the screen than he strictly needs in order to tell a story—not a case of indiscipline, I believe, but of sheer pleasure in moviemaking. When Anderson describes his methods in interviews, his eyes darting at the questioner and then looking away, he can be maddeningly diffident, as if he were just some fellow hanging around the set when marvellous things happened. He wants you to know that he’s from the Valley and not, say, from Paris; art talk is forbidden. Guarded and proud, he is the most perverse, most talented American movie director since Robert Altman.
His latest, “One Battle After Another,” which is in the running to win some of the big awards on Oscars night, comes close to tossing us overboard from the beginning. Near the Mexican border, a ragtag crew of armed leftists liberates a group of immigrants held in an open-air pen. The action is pell-mell, rushed. When does it take place? Who are these American revolutionaries? White and Black warriors fight side by side, so they can’t be, as some reviewers have suggested, a version of the bomb-wielding Weather Underground of the seventies, which was overwhelmingly white. O.K., the movie is a fantasia, an interracial myth. Yet there’s something scarily authentic in these scenes. The immigrants are hunted by a military goon squad in full battle dress, terrifying enough in the morning-in-Falluja style of current ICE warriors. They bash through storefronts. Whenever the story is set, “Battle” is a movie of our moment.
The dominant player in this embattled space is a Black revolutionary named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a woman so aroused by violence that she wants to fornicate with her boyfriend (Leonardo DiCaprio) while planting explosives in the middle of a siege. She’s a gun-toting guerrilla, all muscle and speed. Is she a liberator, or a betrayer? Before we can possibly sort her out, she disappears from the movie (though she does leave an heir). Like Perfidia, Anderson will not be defined by anyone’s easy understanding. He works in Hollywood, with studio backing, but he’s a true independent, writing his own scripts, working with the same cinematographers (Robert Elswit, and then Michael Bauman) from movie to movie. He has made ten features, but you can’t find a consistent stylistic mode in his work. Still, there’s a strong current of observation and judgment. Anderson creates movies about people who are cut off, adrift, desperately seeking connection. He makes studies of American loneliness. As a filmmaker, he discovered the condition before it became an epidemic.
Anderson was born in 1970 in Studio City—in Hollywood terms, on the wrong side of the hill. He attended a number of private schools and then was briefly one of David Foster Wallace’s students at Emerson College. He began making movies as a kid, and just kept going as a teen-ager and college dropout, skipping film school and educating himself at home by putting on a movie as soon as he woke and then a second and a third later in the day. Even now, he usually has something from Turner Classic Movies playing in his house.
His first feature, “Hard Eight” (1996), was an elegantly formalized gangster movie. A retired tough guy (Philip Baker Hall) leads a quiet life in a Reno hotel. He gambles a little, commands the lounge. He also takes a mysterious interest in a hapless drifter, a man of wandering attention and limited will (John C. Reilly)—the first of a recurring Anderson character type, the schlub. The two loners reach out to each other. (Gwyneth Paltrow, as a drab waitress-hooker, is along for the ride.) The movie is tightly controlled, a matter of theme and variation. Anderson was ready to break out. And he did.
Just a year later came “Boogie Nights,” a picture set, as an opening title informs us, in “San Fernando Valley 1977.” The extraordinary shot that ensues takes us into one of the Valley’s pleasure centers. Stationed outside a pulsating disco club, the camera picks up a boat-size Cadillac on the street, and follows the passengers into the club, where they are greeted by the owner, who rouses his staff to their presence and then directs the guests to their table, where they are joined by a porn starlet on skates, who heads off to the bathroom, at which point the camera abandons her and settles on the face of a watchful young waiter. It is one unbroken movement, three minutes of glorious Steadicam, flowing but densely populated and intimately characterized, a director’s virtuoso way of announcing “Move over, Altman, I’m here!” It also introduces the principal players of a Valley porn community—Burt Reynolds’s Jack Horner, the genial boss; Julianne Moore’s Amber Waves, the frequently naked den mother; and Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler (a nom de foutre), whose outsized member rapidly becomes the company’s main attraction. Joined by others, they form a kind of family.
Anderson satirizes these third-raters in a remarkably gentle way. A group of rootless young people, not too bright, gratefully fall into the sex business, where they can earn a living and possibly turn themselves into a brand. “Boogie Nights” becomes a droll testament to entrepreneurial capitalism: the happy collective offers networking, mentorship, resources. Anderson’s joke is that suave Jack Horner thinks he is doing artistic work and wants to do work that’s even better. He’s an American; he has aspirations. Jack’s single-level ranch house, with its curved pool, its stone fireplace, its piles of cocaine scattered around like bowls of cocktail peanuts, is, for the porn kids, as good as Versailles. What more could one want in life? Anderson doesn’t need to lecture us on shallowness and nihilism. When a woman O.D.s and no one cares, we get the point. Anderson is so tender an ironist that his swirling camera, moving in and out of scenes, successfully pulls together the group as a family. Porn, absurdly, becomes a haven for the lost.
The San Fernando Valley was once a place of oak savanna and grassland. In this tranquil paradise, communities such as Burbank, Encino, and Van Nuys began to form more than a hundred years ago. A splurge in defense production during the Second World War and the general prosperity of the postwar years quintupled the population and made it into what it is today: vast, impersonal, crisscrossed with what some natives call stroads (wide neonized streets that feel like roads). To outsiders, it may seem like a nightmare, but Anderson loves the place—not uncritically but obsessively, the way Woody Allen loves the Upper East Side.
“Magnolia,” the film that followed “Boogie Nights,” is a kind of Valley opera, more than three hours of lamentation and execration. Anderson draws us into the intractable personal messes of twelve characters—some of them a generation older than the porn actors but just as forlorn. At the heart of the movie is a long-running locally produced quiz show in which grownups and children are pitted against each other. The show is the presiding metaphor: the family link has been broken, leaving parents and kids at each other’s throats, with violations in the past and present bordering on child abuse. The men and women live mostly on the edges of the Valley’s great obsession—the TV industry—and the assorted stories suggest not just the breakdown of family but the dissolution of self, as if the characters had all given themselves up to the media, leaving an insatiable need that can be relieved only with terrific volleys of cursing. (The great Julianne Moore, back again, gets off some hair-curling riffs.) None of these people are home. Broken families and the loss of self may have seemed rather solemn preoccupations for such a young man; Anderson, no longer young, remains obsessed with these things. In his own life, he’s a homebody. He has four children with his partner, the actress and comedian Maya Rudolph, and has told an interviewer, “I can’t imagine my life without children.”
It became clear with “Magnolia” that Anderson could do amazing things with actors. His screenplays provide dialogue and movement, nothing more, leaving the actors to flesh out an idiosyncratic idea of character, which he supports as they take that idea to the limit. In “Magnolia,” Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a performance of heartbreaking delicacy as a male nurse who just barely asserts his existence by acting as selflessly as possible—a paradox, but Hoffman pulls it off. In the opposite mode, Tom Cruise, pelvis thrust out, stretching his arms in an arc, as if he were a longbow ready to fire, shows up as a bombastic sex guru leading a crowd of hooting young men in obscene pep talks. Just when the film threatens to devolve into a series of exploding arias, Anderson slams the characters into one another and intercuts their noisy dilemmas. As in “Boogie Nights,” his hyperactive camera, rushing up and down corridors, cascading onto the street, tumbling into tunnel-like passageways, pulls the miserable men and women together. Only someone with a deep reservoir of sympathy could order their desperate incoherence into art.
Anderson wasn’t done with the Valley. In “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002), a lovely young woman (Emily Watson) relentlessly pursues an Andersonian schlub—a thirtysomething man (Adam Sandler) so far out of it that he calls a phone-sex line with his pants on. Sandler’s voice seems stuck like wet cement in his nose. Why is this woman interested in him? “Love” fails as romantic comedy, but it succeeds as an evocation of Valley oddities and frights: a vaguely menacing cargo space that Sandler works in; an out-of-control car, spinning on the street, that no one takes notice of; a man walking alone on the sidewalk and therefore asking for trouble.
In the Valley, you don’t walk alone at night. But the two people at the heart of “Licorice Pizza” (2021)—a harmless but eager fifteen-year-old salesman-hustler (Cooper Hoffman) and an irresolute young woman (Alana Haim), maybe ten years older—race all over the place, day and night, and seem blessed by invulnerability. The movie is set in 1973, when Anderson was three, and may represent his longing for a time when the Valley was teen heaven, and a center of disreputable commercial activity—the emergence of the waterbed as a large sex toy, the triumphant return of the pinball machine—that teens could actually control. Hoffman and Haim come irritably close to sex but never have it; the movie, innocent and free, is devoted mainly to walking, running, and sprinting in the paradisal Valley. Centered on nothing more than the love of shooting films, “Licorice Pizza” is the best (and certainly the most expensive) home movie ever made. Anderson’s friends turn up—Sean Penn doing a gravely sodden imitation of the actor William Holden, Bradley Cooper lampooning Jon Peters (hairdresser, studio boss, and Barbra Streisand’s boyfriend), as a controlling lunatic with burning eyes. If Anderson ever wanted to do a full-blown satire of Hollywood, these beautifully written and acted cameos suggest that he could do it better than anyone. The Valley, it seems, is the source of Anderson’s freedom as a filmmaker.
Where did the incredible wealth of California come from? As a boy, Anderson wondered about the oil wells in nearby Bakersfield. In an interview with Charlie Rose, he recalled asking, “What the hell is this stuff, and how did they get it out of the ground?” The strange epic that he made to satisfy that curiosity, “There Will Be Blood” (2007), is propelled, like many epics, by the force of a man’s rage, as well as by devotion to a great undertaking and by a mood of pitiless resolution. It begins in darkness, in New Mexico, where the film’s protagonist, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), prospects for silver at the bottom of a mine. He then moves to Southern California, here impersonated by Marfa, Texas, with its knobby brownish high desert. (“Giant” and “No Country for Old Men” were also shot there.) It’s a surly, unbeautiful landscape, and we come to know it well. Plainview swindles people out of their land, he drills, he builds houses and schools, and he creates not just California but, by extension, America. He’s the epitome of a Hobbesian capitalist: he must constantly grab more resources and wealth lest someone take away what he has—as powerful a myth of the industrial founding fathers as the movies are likely to give us.
Plainview is lonely by choice. Lean and strong, his beatific smile hidden, Day-Lewis, who appears in nearly every scene, has the scale and power of greatness. To help Day-Lewis get the American voice right, Anderson showed him “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” John Huston’s 1948 classic about the corrosive effects of greed, so that Day-Lewis could hear the sound of Huston’s father, Walter Huston, as an old prospector. Plainview has the prospector’s voice without his gaiety. He’s a hard man: friendless, asexual—one of Melville’s isolatoes. The truly lonely, it seems, may create and destroy themselves at the same time. In all, Plainview is a movie character large enough to set beside Charles Foster Kane. They both wind up as solitaries in huge California mansions.
Few American films have been so attentive to the raw materiality of enterprise—exhausting labor, heavy tools, viscous black muck. But “Blood” is hardly an industrial documentary. Anderson’s composer, Jonny Greenwood (from Radiohead), alternates tones of wailing electronic despair and a pounding rhythm that mainlines energy. The camera sweeps across the bedraggled little town, with its railroad station and tin lizzies. Anderson’s visual imagination, however active, is disciplined by a stern aesthetic that becomes almost moral in its insistence. He may jump ahead within a given line of movement, cutting from one decisive moment to the next, but he mainly stays on the ground, in real space, disdaining the up-in-the-air digital schlock that has all but destroyed movie aesthetics in the past thirty years. With “Blood,” Anderson reclaimed the horizontal magnificence of turf-bound films like “The Searchers” and “Lawrence of Arabia.” The Valley guy had ambitions, it seemed, beyond estimation.
Before he shot “The Master,” the dreamy, haunting film he made after “There Will Be Blood,” Anderson immersed himself in the period after the Second World War, when many Americans turned to such things as self-help movements, diet regimens, yoga, and paranoid-prophetic new religions. What cure could there be for purposelessness and disconnection? Anderson found the origins of present fads in the fervent nostrums of the past. Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the master of the title, is clearly based on L. Ron Hubbard, the charismatic leader of Dianetics and then Scientology. A fluent producer of mythological and psychological “systems,” Dodd is avuncular and welcoming in public but implacably bullying in private sessions, where he submits his victims to hypnosis and ego-busting questions, wiping them clean in order to possess them forever. At first glance, “The Master” is another of Anderson’s group films: lost people gather around a charismatic leader. But, if “Boogie Nights” offered a soiled but benevolent family, this group—wife, children, followers, hangers-on—is held together by pathetic subservience and a meanness disguised as concern. Grave as most of it is, the movie is animated by amused contempt.
Into their midst ambles Anderson’s ultimate loner, the anarchic Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), an alcoholic, violent, and sex-obsessed Navy veteran. John Huston again helped inspire the hero’s character. Anderson and his crew studied Huston’s 1946 documentary about shell-shocked soldiers, “Let There Be Light,” which the Army, wary of showing any signs of American weakness, prevented from circulating until 198o. Some of Huston’s dazed subjects stare vacantly into the camera. Phoenix’s performance can be seen as a delayed liberation of those unknown men; he speaks for them, acts for them. The actor brings to the set his scarred lip and twisted shoulder; he wears his pants belted high in forties style and sticks his left arm into his side, as if he were preventing himself from falling over. Physically, he could be an orangutan in distress. Yet Phoenix is still surprisingly potent, commanding us with his gleaming black hair and rakish grin. You are never sure when he will explode.
Early on, there are slow-moving but tense confrontations between Dodd and Freddie in which Hoffman and Phoenix appear to be competing over who can hold the camera longest before delivering a line. The two men need and necessarily hate each other. Anderson juices their struggle, but, oddly, he doesn’t resolve it. He has told interviewers that a character can grow and change, and in “The Master” he allows Freddie to take over the movie. Dodd and his menacing crew may hope to train him, but the point, we realize after a while, is that Freddie Quell can’t be quelled. He’s miserable and free, beyond the cult’s “help.” He wanders, and “The Master” wanders with him—out to sea, into the desert, around rooms. Anderson seems unwilling to wrap things up, and the picture ends tentatively, in melancholy mystery. The title, it turns out, is misleading. Freddie has no master. In the case of Plainview and Freddie Quell, loneliness may be incurable.
Four Valley films, joyous and grim; a birth-of-a-nation industrial masterpiece; meditations on narcissism and control. Anderson’s visions of lonely Americans have mostly been serious movies budgeted in the twenty-to-forty-million-dollar mid-range, some profitable, some not. Warner Bros., to its credit, ignored the hard mockery of industry skeptics who called Anderson a “cult director,” and budgeted “One Battle After Another” at a hundred and thirty million dollars. (The final number was higher.) Anderson responded by summoning all his filmmaking prowess to deliver speed, impact, and violent beauty. The camera, for instance, stays with groups of people moving rapidly, so that we feel close to them as they move, and their movements become weighted, consequential. Even material that is borderline crazy is staged with such conviction and humor that, in the end, you marvel at your disbelief. If you feel left behind at times, bafflement is part of the movie’s power; catching up is part of its pleasure.
In the tumultuous early section, for instance, we see no more than fragments of a brief affair that the revolutionary Perfidia has with Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the military leader of the anti-immigrant goons. Lockjaw is a clear descendant of Sterling Hayden’s mad general in “Dr. Strangelove,” but as Penn creates him—muscled arms bulging like veined sides of beef, his twitchy voice reaching beneath the bottom octave—he’s enjoyably repulsive, a daft, macho gooney bird, just this side of cartoon. Anderson takes him where Kubrick could not take Hayden. The wall-slamming sex that Lockjaw has with Perfidia is a hate fuck, if there ever was one, perhaps the first in big-studio moviemaking. What’s it doing there?
In his 2014 adaptation of “Inherent Vice,” a Thomas Pynchon novel that had come out five years earlier, Anderson bollixed himself trying to recapture the author’s jaunty hipster-noir tone. The result was a disjointed mess—whimsical, arbitrary, almost unwatchable. Undiscouraged, he struggled to adapt an earlier Pynchon book, “Vineland” (1990). In the end, “One Battle After Another” deep-sixes Pynchon’s delirious paranoia while retaining the emotional core of the novel, in which the past, as in a Victorian fiction, charges into the present and reshapes it. The revolution is dead, but an extraordinary sixteen-year-old girl, Willa (Chase Infiniti), who has both the ferocity of her mother, Perfidia, and an enchanting smile, lives in its debris with one of Anderson’s most pathetic losers—the former revolutionary Bob (DiCaprio, in a ratty bun), broken down and exhausted, sipping cheap wine in a bathrobe and going from one toke to the next. The setup may be simple, but the emotional power that it unleashes is enveloping, at times close to anguish. If Bob cares only for the daughter he thinks is his, Lockjaw, who wants to be admitted to some sort of élite white-purity Christian society, cares only to eliminate the biracial girl who threatens his acceptance. It’s a commercial premise: the slob in a red plaid bathrobe fights a one-man army. Anderson, it turns out, is good at box-office.
He gets out into the open—into the rolling hills and the sullen desert of the Anza-Borrego area, just north of the Mexican border. Again, not a beautiful landscape, but it’s the great American West, and a symbolic drama plays out there. Who will control Willa? That is, who shall inherit America? The dead-souled Christian white men or the multicultural, violently alive dissidents? Such a polarized fable may be hard to stomach as politics, but as a movie myth it works with smashing success.
Anderson and his crew repeatedly studied the pulverizing chase near the end of “The French Connection” (1971), in which a gangster commands a runaway subway train on an elevated line while below, on the street, Gene Hackman, in an unmarked car, bashes people out of the way to keep up with him. That sequence has two elements. Anderson tops it with three: on California’s Route 78, in an area of rolling hills known as the Texas Dip, Willa is in one car, a hired assassin follows her in a second, and Bob brings up the rear. None of them quite knows what is going on, and they are all blind when approaching one of the road’s abrupt hills. This ending hadn’t been planned; a location scout discovered the Texas Dip on a routine scouting expedition, and then Anderson, after pre-shooting with his cellphone, worked out the logistics with his crew. Sheer chance, joined to filmmaking professionalism pushed to the extreme, carries the movie to an overwhelming climax. A long-delayed reunion between father (the only real father) and daughter establishes that, yes, there is something called home, and it is worth fighting for. Loneliness need not be our fate. A master filmmaker in mid-career, Anderson is home now, for a spell, but it’s impossible to believe that he’ll stay there very long. ♦