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Bigger, Louder, More FrogsHow Paul Thomas Anderson sets himself apart from Hollywood's other wunderkinds.

By Dennis Lim
Posted Monday, Dec. 24, 2007, at 2:34 PM ET

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The prominent bursts of music—and the way the narratives rely on musical principles like rhythm, tone, and phrasing—result in a kind of delirious synesthesia. His movies set off a crazy multitude of sensory triggers, leaving the impression that Anderson is working from a larger palette than most filmmakers. Punch-Drunk Love syncs its hero's panic attacks and joyful palpitations with Brion's volatile score and Jeremy Blake's intensely chromatic digital patterns, which appear throughout as punctuation. The kaleidoscope swirl of sound and color and movement hits its dizzy nirvana in a sequence that reunites Sandler's Barry and his beloved Lena (Emily Watson) in the flamingo-pink lobby of a Waikiki hotel. She throws herself at him and they kiss, silhouetted in an archway that opens onto a green lawn, a pink wall, and the gleaming blue of the Pacific. "He Needs Me," the cockeyed love theme from Robert Altman's Popeye, swells on the soundtrack.

The Popeye song is a nod to a director who often comes up in discussions of Anderson. It's true that Boogie Nights and Magnolia juggle their ensemble casts as adroitly as Altman did in Nashville and Short Cuts and that Altman was something of a real-life mentor: Anderson was a standby director on A Prairie Home Companion, and There Will Be Blood is dedicated to the late director. But Altman was never this interested in spectacle, and while he was routinely called a misanthrope, Anderson is anything but. (There Will Be Blood is a film about a misanthrope, not a misanthropic film.)

If the Altman comparisons seem grossly reductive, it's because Anderson is liberal when it comes to borrowing from the greats. Why not combine Altman's panoramic outlook with Stanley Kubrick's formal bravura with John Cassavetes' messy candor? While Anderson fits the profile of a "hysterical realist," to evoke the pejorative literary buzz-phrase of a few years ago, his films never indulge in excess for the sake of excess. He's a born showman—his first three films bore the Barnumesque credit "A P.T. Anderson picture"—but his go-for-broke tendencies are tied to an expansive, humanist impulse.

Anderson subverts the stereotype of the chilly, Kubrickian technical genius. He makes stunning use of gliding, Steadicam-abetted tracking shots, a favorite trick of showoff directors. (In Boogie Nights, he and his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, quote two of the best-known tracking shots in film history: Goodfellas' nightclub prowl and I Am Cuba's swimming-pool dive.) But the snaking camerawork is not simply a demonstration of daredevil prowess. Often it provides social or emotional context. While David Fincher, for instance, has a special love for spatially impossible, digitally enhanced camera maneuvers, Anderson's long, unbroken takes are rooted in human movement and contact. They speak to the interconnectedness of his characters or the distance between them.

Five films into his career, Anderson still makes whiz-kid movies, and I mean that in the best way. There's a bratty perfectionism on display—his films appear to be made by someone who gets what he wants. As he has matured, though, his obsession with size and scale has become less about sprawl or duration than intensity. Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood are remarkable feats of concentration. They're distilled, interior epics. Anderson's detractors may be right when they complain that he can work only at a grandiose pitch. But there are worse challenges for a young director than having to find new ways to satisfy his enormous appetites—and his appetite for enormity.

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Dennis Lim is editorial director at the Museum of the Moving Image and a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Illustration by Charlie Powell.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I believe that PTA IS the greatest young director we have produced, but I'm always surprised that people bring up influences like Altman without bringing up Scorsese. "Boogie Nights" owes itself, more than any other film, to "Goodfellas" (and to a lesser extent "Raging Bull"), with the aggressive camera-work, the FANTASTIC editing, and musical imprint, and PTA's greatest asset is his incredible ability to know where to put the camera and what to do with it, like Scorsese. While someone like Sofia Copolla has a gift for composition and Tarantino can load a image with references, PTA is absolutely brilliant with understanding composition, movement, color, and sound. THIS is why people think he's so grandiose, because very few people can infuse all these elements into a complex whole and when people do it consistently, it can feel epic.

I haven't loved everything he's done, but I've never seen a young director of this generation who understands filmmaking so thoroughly as PTA. I can't wait to see "There Will be Blood."

--mcgeorge

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(12/26)

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