“You know, I'm gonna be a great big bright, shining star.”

    Booige Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling epic, opens with a swirling shot that introduces us to every major character we will experience in this 1970s set drama around the pornography industry. The shot is often cited as an homage to directors like Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, but watch how Mr. Anderson moves his camera and captures the dialogue. It is not the menial conversations that Mr. Altman perfected in films like The Player and Nashville, nor is it the straight forward moving camera of Mr. Scorsese in Goodfellas. Instead, Mr. Anderson pains a portraiture of connections between characters, the current power dynamics, and the desires of characters toward each other. He swings his camera back and forth in his extended takes, changing music at each beat, and capturing the interconnectedness of this family.

    I use family as a direct choice because no better word captures the thematic power of Boogie Nights. Mr. Anderson’s film might revolve around the pornographic industry, but the focus of the characters—their wants, actions, and motives—could be beautifully transposed into situations without the explicit material. Instead, the narrative function of the pornographic material serves as a catalyst and an environment in which the characters can move up and toward their wild tracks.

    While Boogie Nights is an ensemble piece, featuring great performances from Julianne Moore, John C Riley, Heather Graham, and especially Burt Reynolds as adult film director Jack Horner, the film is centered around the story of Dirk Diggler, played by a young Mark Wahlberg. Rewatching the first scene between Mr. Wahlberg and Mr. Reynolds, its clear how Mr. Anderson loves to layer his dialogue just under the surface—Jack points out to Dirk that he could get a nightclub job miles closer to his own home, and Dirk only quietly respond before asking him whether Jack would like to see what he hides under his pants.

    Dirk’s transition into this family dynamic is filled with roles that seem almost natural to the family dynamic, but are charged with biting satire. One of the most humorous is Dirk’s relationship with Reed Rothchild, played by Mr. Riley in the competitive brotherly spirit. In an early scene, the two compare their physical feats of strength, when they are actually sizing each other’s sexual ferocity. Ms. Moore plays Horner’s main star, the cleverly named Amber Waves, who acts like a mother character for Dirk. When Dirk becomes more ambitious and arrogant than Jack, the triangle between the three characters plays as the usual rehashed Oedipal cycle, but since Dirk is literally having sex with his mother, it shows that Mr. Anderson is self-aware of the structure of his familial relationships as well.

    As much as Boogie Nights is obsessed with a nostalgia for this moment of the Golden Age of Porn, the characters take a turn for the worse, brilliant set at the exact moment the 1980s begin. Dirk, Jack, and Amber are such products of the era of the 1970s—Jack’s desire to make films with real stories instead of simply pornography seems to be a reflection of the New Hollywood era of the time, making his fall in the 1980s a curious metaphor for the fall of independent Hollywood in the age of video. As the characters fall into oblivion, mainly by cocaine, it becomes clear that Mr. Anderson is making a film that is less about nostalgia than about letting go of nostalgia—the characters of Boogie Nights seem stuck in their moment, and when they move down (at one point, Dirk and Reed attempt to become an 80s rock band), they fall into an era of anachronism than anything else. These people were alive and at the top of their game for a brief moment, and that moment has fallen.

    Boogie Nights, despite its two and a half running time, never feels long. It violently shifts between screwball comedy, horrific drama, and the strange sense of wondermeant. This is beautifully supported by Mr. Anderson’s soundtrack, which is overloaded with hits from the era. While the sheer number of songs might feel like overload, Mr. Anderson uses each song as both an instigator of the scene, as well as a reflection. In a crucial scene, Dirk listens to Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl,” only to realize that he’s lost sight of what he wanted, and what drew him to this life.

    Visually, Mr. Anderson does owe much to Mr. Scorsese, with his mix of long takes and visually quick cut editing, but Mr. Anderson is always self-aware of how he is borrowing from others, as well as how he is constructing he is playing with a usual rise and fall narrative. He almost jokingly uses an iris shot to create desire between characters, and introduces a final sequence with a title card that reads “One Last Thing (The Long Way Down).” He shows that he is aware of how he is constructing a classical narrative, and wants us to be a part of the experience, letting the sexuality of the character act as the twist to this story.

    Which is what I think Mr. Anderson has accomplished with his nostalgic look back at the 1970s, by creating an intimate portrait of family. Mr. Anderson asks us to observe what makes family—the hardships, the fights, the love, and the friendships. Its about change and evolution in tumultuous times, living in the moment, and then dealing with the quick fade out of the era. Essentially, Boogie Nights tells the same stories that everyone lives. They just do it with a little more style, and, well, a lot more of something else.