Boogie Nights came out when we were in Arkansas and for some reason Jami wasn't around (probably jobbing) so I went with two colleagues. I remember they were a lot more impressed with it than I was, but theirs has been the consensus view. Since then I've only seen one other Paul Thomas Anderson film, which was Punch-Drunk Love, another film I failed to see what the fuss was about. And now we're essentially three-for-three, although I should qualify that by saying this is a very solid and engrossing, rather mainstream, a bit old fashioned Hollywood picture. (And of the three, the one I would be keenest to re-watch, despite it being over 2 and a half hours long.) This seems a bit like PTA doing Quentin Tarantino, to be honest: not only does it star Leonardo DiCaprio (another person whose greatness, except in his breakout role in What's Eating Gilbert Grape rather escapes me), but it's a lot of memorable set pieces, snappy dialogue (albeit less artificial in this than in your average Tarantino) and rather a lot of uncomfortable racial talk.
There's some real tensions in this movie. On the one hand, it foregrounds "people of color" and women, but on the other, the two "stars" (and the first two people listed in the credits) are DiCaprio and, in a showy role as kind of a cartoon villain, Sean Penn. (Third in the credits is the "star" who most impressed me, Benicio Del Toro. I'd definitely watch a spinoff movie about his character.)
OK, so a lightning rundown of the plot. The first, ooh, quarter of the movie, is 16 years before the rest of it, and details the exploits of the "French 75" - a kind of American Baader Meinhof (or latterday Weather Underground, I guess) group, whom we first see breaking into an immigration detention center (back when they were just wire fences) and freeing as many people as they could. The group is a motley, mixed-race group, for whom "Ghetto Pat" (DiCaprio) is their bomb guy. The leader seems to be the older guy played by Wood "Avon Barksdale" Harris, and somewhere in there is one of the Haim sisters -
the one with the snaggle tooth who was the female lead in PTA's previous (Licorice Pizza - which, as I recall, got some flack for anti-Asian insensitivity). There are also three black women in leadership roles - "Junglepussy" (see what I mean? Very Tarantinoesque), the calm, serious Deandra (played by Regina Hall), and, most important, the borderline unhinged Perfidia Beverley Hills, played the the ferocious hilt by Teyana Taylor. No secret is made of the fact that she gets off on all of this, to the benefit of Ghetto Pat, who follows her like a puppy.
However, he's not the only one. On that first raid on the camp, Perfidia bursts in on a dozing commander, Sean Penn's Colonel Steven Lockjaw
(sheesh. There are a few other names like that. Apparently this film was "inspired" by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland - he doesn't go in for that sort of thing, does he?) Anyway, she intentionally gets him aroused in a way that gets him completely fixated on her. This means that he stalks the French 75 until, on a job where they all dress up as respectable citizens
he has a chance to get her alone when, to her surprise, he confesses that he doesn't care what she does so long as she meets up with him at a certain place and time (and returns his hat and gun that she took from him). In other words, if she has sex with him he'll let her guys continue their "revolution." Well...
True to his word, he doesn't stop the French 75... and Perfidia becomes pregnant. She is not happy about it and prefers to continue as if she wasn't - there's a shot of her firing a machine gun (which is mirrored by her daughter doing the same later) while hugely pregnant
that actually upset me because surely that much noise is not good for the fetus! And then the baby is born, and Pat is overjoyed, because they're a family! And they can quit the revolution stuff before it gets them killed. Except Perfidia doesn't want to stop. So Pat stays home while she goes out and revolution-izes. And then comes the moment that Lockjaw can no longer ignore...
...a bank heist goes wrong and Perfidia shoots a guard. Then he has to get her. (The aftermath of the bank job is one of the more bravura set pieces - they split into two different car loads and squeal across traffic, getting in all kinds of scrapes, until the car Perfidia is in crashes irreparably, and she starts running. We then get a bird's eye view of the cop cars cornering her. Now Lockjaw can't protect her, except if she names names. Well... we watch as one after the other of the characters we have come to know get bumped off by Lockjaw. (The Haim sister gets a particularly abrupt offing.) I think it's left vague whether or not Avon gets out alive, as he's being gassed and shot at, but has a gas mask, but for sure we only know that the nerdy white guy (who gives Pat a special phone that plays a tune when it's near another one of the same kind, which only the French 75 have, as well as new identities, taken from newly dead people, of Bob and Willa Ferguson for him and the baby (real name Charlene), and Deandra, who is there to see him off as he leaves his mothers-in-law (who are surprisingly old, and also a previous generation of revolutionaries) and heads off to a place called Baktan Cross (which is supposed to be a "sanctuary city" in California, but looks like a rustbelt city in Pacific Northwest climate and foliage).
Meanwhile, Lockjaw has put Perfidia in witness protection... Until one day he shows up with flowers to find that she's fled the nest and we watch her making it across the border (ah, the good old days).
Cut to 16 years later and we meet her daughter practicing Karate with her sensei (Del Toro). Willa (who is incredibly striking looking, played by a newcomer with a name to rival any of the French 75's - Chase Infiniti) has been raised by Bob (as we know him for the rest of the movie), and while she's turned out great (we see Bob meeting her teacher who conveys as much), he has, by his own admission, fried his brains on weed and alcohol, trying to put his past behind him. (This becomes a problem, played for laughs, when he has to remember old passwords when he finally puts one of those phones into action and he just can't. This is another Tarantino-esque moment.)
But unfortunately for him, Lockjaw is trying to join some kind of covert society (like that one in Texas that George Bush Sr. was supposed to be part of, that launched Alex Jones's career) that has very strict laws against miscegenation, and as he believes that Willa is actually his daughter, she has to be removed from any possible discovery. (Of course, him going after her pretty much blows his cover to the secret society, who have fingers in all pies, including the Chicken company in Baktan Cross that he raids.) And if you thought the movie was pretty much non-stop action before, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Lockjaw arrives in Baktan with a helicopter and sends one group of soldiers to the high school, that is having its prom, and another to Bob's house in the woods. They know about Bob and Willa because they capture the guy who gave them those identities (who is running a "Hispanic underground railroad" (of which Sensei is a vital part) starting in El Paso, and while he is initially contemptuous of their questions, they threaten his sister. (I never found Penn's Lockjaw scary, but there is one guy who terrified me, and its the guy who conducts all the interviews. He's terrifyingly realistic, and scary while being low key, the very opposite of Penn's approach. He very easily conveys the hopelessness of the situation of anyone being interviewed.) Anyway, after nerdy white guy is dragged off by the (brown - he turns out to be Native American) tracker who has located him, two kids, obviously part of the network who are sitting outside run in and spread a message through the revolutionary radio system. And it's because of this that Deandra shows up to the prom
and triggers Willa's phone, that Bob insisted she take with her. Well-trained, Willa goes with Deandra just as the soldiers arrive and round up anyone who knows her. (They are a very believable bunch - they look and talk just like real highschoolers, at least, the ones I've seen in my teaching.) One of them cracks and reveals that Willa has a phone, despite Bob being convinced she doesn't, because he's never allowed her one, and despite her telling Deandra that she doesn't. So, while Deandra throws it out the window of their van when it rings, it alerts the soldiers to where they're headed (a radical weed-growing nunnery in the hills). Meanwhile, Bob gets out of his house by a tunnel as Lockjaw comes in the door, and heads for Sensei's place. And Sensei has to rescue him at least twice,
all while sending the cops and soldiers the wrong way, and hiding all the migrants who are sheltering in his building. As I said, I'd watch the spin off that stars him any day.
At this point there's probably a good 50 minutes left, but it just flies by. Willa arrives at the nunnery where she learns that everyone besides Bob does not regard her as a hero, but rather a rat. She stays for a little while (long enough to fire that machine gun)
before Lockjaw finds her, and runs a DNA test on her. She pretty quickly twigs why he's doing that). Then he drives off, with Bob in hot pursuit, and hands her off to that tracker, with a request to bump her off. The tracker refuses - he won't kill kids - at which Lockjaw (who doesn't know that there's been a meeting of that secret society
revealing his racial indiscretions, and that a very preppy-looking assassin has been assigned to "clean everything up") just instructs him to drop her off at "the usual place". This turns out to be run by white supremacists, who make the mistake of using anti-Indian slurs on the tracker one too many times, and he changes his mind about handing over Willow. The resulting firefight leaves only Willa, with her hands ziptied. However, she can still drive and off she sets. Meanwhile, the assassin flies past the crappy car that Bob's stolen, catches up to Lockjaw, and blasts him in the face with a shotgun, causing his SUV to flip off the isolated desert highway. Bob finds the wreck, and after casting around to see if Willa has been thrown clear, realizes that Lockjaw must have dropped her off and heads off. Then (somehow) we get into a race with Willa in front, the assassin coming up fast behind her, and Bob in the rear. Willa knows the person behind her means her harm, Bob suspects it. Willa doesn't know it's Bob in the rear, however. And they're all, one after the other, rising and falling over a series of undulating hills (really, if you saw this in IMAX you'd puke) in an incredibly tense chase. That reaches a shocking conclusion.
Then we see Lockjaw, with his weird little rooster strut, walking towards us along the road, carrying a rifle in the regulation fashion, his head just a mass of gore.
And then we see the now hideously-scarred Lockjaw explaining to the interviewers at the secret society that he was "reverse raped" and his semen stolen, and that's how Willa came to be. The interviewers seem to accept this, and welcome him into the society, and into his luxurious corner office. If you can't guess what happens next, then you must have been looking at your phone and not watching the movie.
Overall, if this was a novel it would definitely be a Dickens rather than a Dostoyevsky. Certainly never boring. And, I suppose, a bit subversive (for a big Hollywood movie) in that the heroes are so plainly the revolutionaries and the migrants, and the establishment are cartoonishly evil (but, well, that's hardly exaggeration, if it ever was). If some kids see this movie and are motivated to blow up a data center, then I think PTA will be proud. However, the movie Bob puts on to watch after Willa has gone off to the Prom is The Battle of Algiers, and this certainly does not compare to that. For one thing, the main French officer in that is almost sympathetic, and still you know the enormity of the struggle, and you know that the revolutionaries are doing it not for kicks but because there is no other option. They can't settle down and relax when one weirdo disappears from the picture.
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