Another December, another hugely anticipated Paul Thomas Anderson uber prestige pic...another evident disappointment. His seventh film, Inherent Vice, has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 72% fresh, his lowest by far, coming in seven points under Punch-Drunk Love, which itself was five points under Magnolia, his third lowest rated. (About Magnolia, quickly: when "ambitious" is one of the nicest things that critics say about your work, that is generally code for this).
Of course, Rotten Tomatoes scores are not at all perfect determinants of film quality, but they are useful indicators, and more often than not capture the overall reception of a film pretty accurately. I find it's always troubling when audience scores are below critics scores, as critics can tend to rationalize themselves into liking a movie that isn't actually very good on its face. The audience, far from being "dumb," is nowadays fairly discerning about their entertainment, and know what they like and why they like it. Inherent Vice has an audience score of 55%. That is shockingly bad.
This process of giddy anticipation followed by the hollow, disappointing thud of reality feels an awful lot like The Master's life-cycle, Anderson's previous film from two years ago. Expectations for that were much higher than for Vice, as The Master was his first film five years after the acclaimed There Will Be Blood. Now we don't really know what to expect, other than a film likely to be something of a chore to sit through.
Blood came five years after Punch-Drunk, and signaled a definitive break with his earlier, more freewheeling, celebratory style, most notably achieved in Boogie Nights. Punch-Drunk itself marked a break from the ensemble efforts of Boogie Nights and its followup Magnolia, focusing on a single star, Adam Sandler. Blood similarly shows Anderson's fascination with showcasing, and perhaps leaning on, a singular star with whom he is greatly enthralled. Now it's on to Joaquin Phoenix, who Anderson evidently thinks is far and away the best actor in the world. In interviews for Punch-Drunk, Anderson gushes about his admiration for Sandler's comedic gifts, calling him a "great communicator," and their collaboration was his attempt to make a middle of the road, crowd-pleasing Adam Sandler mega-hit comedy.
He felt that he failed in this attempt, wishing that it was a funnier movie with more laughs. He's right--it isn't a laugh out loud Adam Sandler comedy like Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, or even Big Daddy. But there is something unmistakably compelling about watching Sandler's comedic persona treated by a serious director--the fundamental disjunction in their sensibilities is itself a fruitful, compelling thing to behold. Anderson sincerely wants to tap into Sandler's comedic gifts, to form a cinematic symbiosis with his star's understanding of communication, which at the time were close to their peak--he just doesn't know how to do it.
There Will Be Blood featured a frighteningly lived-in performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, seeming to channel the beating, demonic, selfish heart at the very core of American capitalism. Expectations for The Master were that Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix, two actors of nearly similar gifts as Day-Lewis (though without the insanely over-the-top Method dedication), were ready to shed as much light on the suspect nature of American religion as Day-Lewis did on American capitalism. Only, the target was an odd one: Scientology, which is not nearly as pernicious, influential, or interesting as the media seems to want it to be. But we were all more than willing to go with it.
After watching The Master as generously as I could, I still had no idea why Anderson was drawn to the material. What was he trying to say about Scientology? Why was he saying it? Does the film teach us anything new about Scientology that we didn't already know, or at least suspect? Or even more broadly, about the nature of cults and frauds? I don't know who said it, it might have even been on Twitter, but the most accurate review of it I remember was: "The Master has the most acting of any movie this year!" It was meant to laud the two showy lead performances, yes, but also as a not so gentle jab at the unmistakable self-indulgence Anderson was clearly veering into.
The Master seems to me to continue a habit Anderson began long ago in Magnolia--deep, nearly solipsistic immersion in his own world, portraying it with too much fidelity, so that we, not being privy to his own mind and memories, don't have enough associations with the signifiers to register much of anything. I'm thinking especially of all the father-son stuff in Magnolia, which seemed way too personal and more important for Anderson himself to have created as a catharsis than for an audience to appreciate as part of a film.
The many weird sexual signifiers of The Master seem similar symptoms of solipsism, of an inability, or unwillingness to get out of his own head. The ultra-creepy masturbation scene, the bizarre naked dancing scene, Joaquin Phoenix's ongoing sexual attraction to the ocean/sand, to name only a few at the top of my mind. Anderson really seems to think that by portraying his own sexual oddness in bluntly unsublimated form he is creating brave, important, capital A Art. This is dangerously close to @GuyInYourMFA territory.
Again, this impulse has been around since Magnolia, but that film at least had the energy of youth, a talented ensemble of dynamic actors, a packed narrative with plenty of other incidents, and the honeymoon afterglow from Boogie Nights in its favor. The Master sees that solipsism take center stage, with little else but the yelling of its two admittedly very game leads.
Of course, since we need to have an American auteur to feel good about, someone to whom we can attach our beliefs in the eternal power of art, and Anderson seems to be the only one around who can fit the bill. Increasingly irrelevant, ridiculous cine-snobs like Richard Brody gushed about the "haunting, utterly inward stillness" of Hoffman and Phoenix's performances. When the chief merit in a very long movie (movies being, you know, a visual medium) is something that only exists inside the actors (who are physicalized extensions of the director's brain), that is not astonishing power--that is emotional autism. Brody actually considers the "opacity" of the film to be a great "achievement." But opacity is not an achievement. It is a failure of communication. Critics like Brody are enabling this autistic streak, which, as youthful energy and the ambition and facility to create interesting ensembles and coherent stories fades, has overtaken just about everything else in Anderson's artistic arsenal.
In reconsidering Anderson's status as an eminent American filmic auteur, one always rubs up against the evident unimpeachable genius of Boogie Nights, which is for Anderson what Pulp Fiction is for Tarantino--an unshakeable bedrock upon which his reputation can rest, no matter what happens.
Looking back on Boogie Nights, it's clear that there is much less there than we have managed to convince ourselves there is. More than anything, I think its sterling reputation rests on the performance of Burt Reynolds, and, secondarily, on the emergent, undeniable star birth of Mark Wahlberg. To a lesser extent, also, nostalgia for Goodfellas, the film that Boogie Nights so clearly wants to be, and just the general joyful exuberance inhering in the best art of the nineties, in a way that doesn't really happen in our more staid, analytic, ironic, compacted age.
Way too much has been said and written about how Pulp Fiction rejuvenated John Travolta, plucking him from irrelevance and setting him back on a dumb track to a lot of these movies for a long time. (Thankfully, that seems to have pretty much ended by now). But Travolta is the worst thing about Pulp Fiction--he has no idea how to play a super cool super dangerous hit man. Just watch how embarrassingly bad he is in this scene, as he says "She's fuckin' OD-ing on me!" about as thinly and un-urgently as possible. Burt Reynolds, on the other hand, is far and away the best thing about Boogie Nights. He's so good it's like he's acting in an entirely different movie, one with real stakes, gravitas, and poignancy.
Maybe Reynolds was just too old to experience a complete career rejuvenation like Travolta, who had the good fortune of sliding into irrelevance at an unusually early age, before Pulp Fiction. And perhaps this was all Reynolds had in him, properly so for something that is so clearly the role of a lifetime. You can't have two roles of a lifetime. His award acceptance speech shows just how deeply similar he is to his character Jack Horner, the gentleman pornographer, always insisting that his porn films have class and integrity. He says those same things about his hope for how Boogie Nights would come out--"we brought some humanity to it [the porn industry], and hopefully some class." Burt Reynolds is Jack Horner, he oozes faded, compromised, but ever resilient, dignity and earnestness. John Travolta was not Vincent Vega, he was just massively visible because of a hugely popular movie, and could be slotted into countless cash-grab action movies and mawkish dramedies immediately after his own rejuvenation.
Part of me can't help thinking that Reynolds exerted a decisive influence on the making of the film. After all, Anderson, though a wunderkind, was only 27 when he made Boogie Nights, and Burt Reynolds exudes such authority and effortless wisdom as seen-it-all film director Jack Horner, I can't imagine him totally turning that off when the cameras stopped. I could be totally wrong about all of this, but I feel like he must've acted like a co-director in his scenes, and he's in most scenes in the movie. Maybe that's why Boogie Nights is so much better than all his other movies (though it's still not nearly as good as its reputation)--there was someone there exerting a checking directorial influence.
Wahlberg is great as well, which is good, because he's just about the only other character who is on screen long enough to do anything interesting. The vaunted Boogie Nights ensemble is more like a recurring series of cameos than real roles, as one after another these bright, shiny faces strut into a room and the scene, or their part in the scene, ends twenty seconds later. It's a three hour movie where only a couple key scenes last longer than a minute or two. The reason the drug deal shootout with Alfred Molina is so memorable and impactful is because it's probably the longest scene in the movie, and it's barely five minutes long itself.
But Wahlberg's effectiveness in the role is deceptive, as he is far more convincing as a sweet, innocent young guy than the supremely confident, universe shattering cocksman he becomes. Wahlberg seems insecure in the role, shaking off his Marky Mark baggage, and that works, because Eddie Adams, or "Dirk Diggler," is insecure, knowing deep down that he is just a dolt who lucked into a freakishly huge penis. Wahlberg seems very much to be playing at being an actor, which mirrors and informs how his character Eddie Adams is playing at being the star "Dirk Diggler."
This almost embarrassing mirroring of real life that was certainly intentional in casting Reynolds, debatably in the casting of Wahlberg, is powerfully present in the tone of the movie as a whole. Indeed, if there is genius in Boogie Nights, it is in how eerily closely the tone of the film mirrors the superficiality of its many characters.
In Dirk Diggler's world, you meet someone at a party and he becomes your best friend and you become his, because you're both chill, rad, fun guys with awesome cocks who are great at banging babes and doing coke. The film itself as a whole takes on that unearned intimacy of its characters. Anderson seems drawn to that fake world because of how deeply entrenched shallowness is in its culture--everyone is kept an arm's (or penis's) length away, no one really opens up, everything is great and super and fun and cool because to act otherwise would be to court reflection, and their lives are too miserable to withstand any tiny fraction of self-analysis. Anderson treats the audience the way that his characters treat each other, and it is not a pleasant feeling.
Of course, a director has no obligation at all to make the audience feel pleasant--doing the opposite is often a nobler, truer aim. It's just that Anderson seems a bit too comfortable doing this, and that tone has continued in his later, more solipsistic work. In The Master, I felt like I was inside him and totally alien to him all at once. He really wants to communicate, but seems incapable of doing so, yet his inability to communicate is praised as high art. Such is the confused, desperate state of American cinema.
So what of Inherent Vice? I actually think it's his best movie, by far. Boogie Nights is juvenile, though inspired, and Punch Drunk Love was purposefully trifling. This was his first movie that combined the inspiration and lightness of his early period with the heft and consequentialness of his later films. It's the movie that his whole career was leading toward, and is a promising sign.
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