All of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are pretty good in their own way, but as we all know, nuance is for sissies. WHAT IS THE BEST? WHAT IS THE WORST? Your internet loins thirst for quantifiables, and I’m here to slake them.
Prepare yourself.
7. Hard Eight
I watched this last night, specifically so that I could write two or three paragraphs about it in a PTA rankings post (time well spent!). Having seen it, I can safely say this: it’s definitely a movie.
Filmmakers always talk about the nineties as a time when indie film studios and cable companies were just dying to give lower budgeted festival films to 20-something film freaks hoping to find the next Tarantino. Sometimes you got Paul Thomas Anderson, sometimes you got Troy Duffy. PTA jumped into Hard Eight as a wet-behind-the-ears 26-year-old, which was probably a great learning experience for him, but mostly unremarkable from a viewer’s standpoint (not that it isn’t competently crafted). It’s slight, but solid.
The most promising thing about it were Anderson’s casting choices – a 31-year-old John C. Reilly, a 29-year-old Philip Seymour Hoffman, 24-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson fresh off Pulp Fiction, all anchored by Philip Baker Hall, Seinfeld‘s Library Detective Bookman. If choosing actors was choosing stocks, PTA was buying Apple shares in 2001. Sidenote: Why couldn’t Detective Bookman have been a character in Inherent Vice? He’s perfect.
Rysher Entertainment was famously lukewarm on the finished film, finally allowing PTA to buy it from them and do his own cut. Though they insisting on calling it Hard Eight instead of the original title, Sydney. “Hard Eight” does seems sexier than “Sydney,” though “Sydney” – Philip Baker Hall’s character – is more representative of what the film’s actually about. Of course, I’ll always think of it as “Philip Baker Hall: Freelance Dad.”
6. Magnolia
Magnolia undoubtedly has some incredible moments (the frogs!) and was almost certainly one of Tom Cruise’s top five performances (it’s between Magnolia and Collateral for number one in my book). Nevertheless, PTA himself recently said of Magnolia “it’s waaay too f*cking long,” and I’m inclined to agree. It seems like the end of every scene has 20 extra seconds of unnecessary camera moves. Anderson wrote it shortly after the death of his father, and it seems like a work that grew out of grief. Art as a product of grief can sort of go either way. I remember reading Joan Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking in grad school. It’s a book about dealing with the death of her husband, and she opens with the conversation she had with her publisher trying to talk her out of writing a grief memoir. I remember getting slogging my way through the book thinking, “you know, I think your publisher was onto something there.”
Lesson: It’s hard to “kill your darlings” when you’re already grieving.
5. Punch Drunk Love
Bagging on Adam Sandler has practically become a national pastime and it’s entirely deserved, but damned if he doesn’t give these occasional glimpses that he could be one of the most fascinating people in entertainment. He did it playing a fictionalized version of himself in Funny People, he did it again playing himself in Top Five (I could watch 10 hours of Adam Sandler doing a Curb-style riff on his own life, seriously), and he arguably first did it as a Bickle-esque oddball in Punch Drunk Love.
According to a recent interview, the movie is actually Anderson’s attempt to take the character he was seeing in Sandler movies he loved, like Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, and Big Daddy – this autistic-ish schlub with a mercurial temper – and put him in real-life situations. It’s basically PTA’s take on a Sandler comedy. I wish more filmmakers would do this. I’d love to see a Wes Anderson cover of Tyler Perry, or Darren Aronofsky’s Bourne.
4. Inherent Vice
I just reviewed this and it’s probably too early to rank. It’s a perfect adaptation of an exhausting novelist, and all the contradictions that entails. If I can look into my crystal balls for a moment, I envision stopping to watch 20-minute chunks of Inherent Vice every time I see it on cable, but never again watching it start to finish.
3. The Master
A lot of people hate this movie and I don’t understand it. Even if you don’t “get” it (and I’m not sure there was some grand message it was trying to impart), is it really so hard to watch? Unlike Inherent Vice, it The Master *is* a film where you could just let the plot points wash over you like a warm bath. I dozed off for a bit the first time I saw it about two thirds of the way through and didn’t hold it against the movie or really feel like it even cheapened the experience. It has a gentle lullaby quality to it. I could’ve watched Joaquin Phoenix do weird sex stuff and drink bleach on a boat shot in 70 mm for four hours. Also, it’s hilarious.
I knew The Master had been effective when I read Going Clear and it was impossible to picture L. Ron Hubbard as anything but Philip Seymour Hoffman.
2. There Will Be Blood
If you don’t like this movie, I hate you. Straight up.
1. Boogie Nights
Most of PTA’s movies are heavy and sort of sit on your chest, and for all their crowd-pleasing moments, they aren’t always something you immediately want to re-experience. Boogie Nights I rewatch over and over and it gets better every time. It’s the perfect combination of heavy and light, of hilarious and disturbing, of art and pop. I can’t think of many moments that aren’t perfect, from Wahlberg singing “The Touch,” to Philip Seymour Hoffman calling himself an idiot, to Roller Girl (forever immortalized in the college dorm poster inside my mind), to William H. Macy blowing his brains out. It would be worth it just to see all these actors in the same movie. That could apply to all of PTA’s movies, but Boogie Nights is that to the tenth power.
I’m going to watch this again just for the “Nevertheless” scene.