Boogie Nights

It's hard to believe that Boogie Nights is almost 25 years old, but indeed it is. It's been airing on various channels in the Showtime package, so I recorded it to do post for when it shows up again. It's got an airing tonight at 11:45 PM on Showtime Extreme, and tomorrow (Nov. 27) at 11:30 PM on Showtime 2, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post here.

The movie opens in the spring of 1977. At a swanky night spot in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, Eddie Adams works as a busboy, even though he has to come by bus al the way from Torrance on the other side of the city, living in very modest means with his parents. Somehow, word has gotten around that Eddie is well-endowed, and one of the patrons of the establishment, Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) has heard of this. He goes into the kitchen and offers to pay to see just how well-endowed Eddie really is.

The reason for this is that Jack is a director of adult movies, and is always on the lookout for new talent because, after all, people age out of the on-camera side of the business fairly quickly. Jack gives Eddie his contact info just in case. As it turns out, Eddie lives with his parents, who don't appreciate him, thinking that he's never going to amount to much and is just mooching off of them. This eventually leads Eddie to run away and go looking for Jack's assistance.

Eddie, it turns out, is a natural at making adult films, thanks in no small part to his size. But he needs a stage name, and he picks "Dirk Diggler". Dirk works with a motley crew of people who have all sorts of problems of their own, with Jack and producer "Colonel" James (Robert Ridgely) being the two most well-adjusted people in their little corner of the business. Among the others are:

Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a woman who has an ex-husband and a child of whom the husband has custody because leaving a child with an adult film star is a big problem;
Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), who eventually becomes Dirk's best friend and non-sexual partner in a string of spy-themed films;
"Rollergirl" (Heather Graham), who dropped out of high school and entered the adult film industry with no other options in life;
Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), who has ambitions of owning his own store selling audio-visual equipment, but needs the money to get it;
Little Bill (William H. Macy), an assistant director who has a wife who will sleep with anybody anywhere, including in a crowd; and
Scotty J. (Philp Seymore Hoffman), who operates the boom mike, and is a gay man who falls in love with Dirk, not that Dirk is in love with him.

At any rate, Dirk becomes a success and has a few years at the top. But then the 1980s come, and with that lots and lots of cocaine. Dirk starts partaking, and that, combined with an outsized ego born of his success, causes him to start losing his place at the top and have a dramatic downturn.

Boogie Nights is an interesting look at a field that I think most of us wouldn't normally have thought of wanting to take a look at, that being behind the scenes of the adult film industry. I'm sure it's a pretty darn sanitized look, considering how many of the principals wind up relatively unscathed by the end of the movie. (AIDS, for example, is not mentioned at all, and the movie ends sometime in 1984.) The movie also runs nearly 2½ hours and begins to lose some steam in the final third of the movie.

On the other hand, the performances are routinely quite good, and I really found myself interested in what was going to happen to these characters. Amber, for example, goes into a custody hearing where she clearly has no chance of getting custody of her son back, but still goes into it, suffering obvious humiliation. Burt Reynolds earned an Oscar nomination, and if you only know him from his 1970s movies, I think you'll be quite surprised by his performance.

So, despite the fact that Boogie Nights has some decided flaws, it's still definitely worth watching.