Paul Thomas Anderson

August 15, 2020
A deep, gorgeous dive into the acclaimed director's films. Nayman follows his Coen brothers book with this visually striking, erudite assessment of Paul Thomas Anderson, another unique writer and director, offering insightful, detailed analyses of movie stills and screenplay texts. He admires Anderson's "heroic--indeed mythic--auteurism." The author begins with an introductory overview of Anderson's life and oeuvre--eight films since 1996, many garnering Academy Award nominations and wins. Born in Studio City, California, Anderson, one of nine children, was raised by a father whose "shadow looms over his son's career," which has run from "promise to fulfillment, apprenticeship to mastery." Given that the author seeks to "let each film exist on its own terms," it's appropriate that he begins with There Will Be Blood, arguably Anderson's most successful, enduring film, a "heady mix of anachronism, allusion and invention" set in late-19th-century New Mexico. Phantom Thread, a "dark-hued comedy of remarriage" set in mid-20th-century England, is last. The Master is "a veiled account of the history of Scientology" while Inherent Vice, a "meta-detective exercise" set in the early 1970s, simultaneously reveres and subverts its source material: "With There Will Be Blood, Anderson showed no compunction about diverging from the work of Upton Sinclair, but his reverence for [Thomas] Pynchon's text, and also for a period closer to his own experience, yielded a sense of fidelity." After examining the "nostalgia and fetishism" of Boogie Nights, Nayman looks at Hard Eight, both "crime thriller and a character study...also simultaneously an old man's movie and a young man's movie." Magnolia is "much closer than it initially seems to Boogie Nights...with the television business swapped for the porn industry," and Punch-Drunk Love is "entirely in [Anderson's] own voice." Wrapping up this vivid book are a series of revealing interviews the author conducted with Anderson's longtime collaborators and a discussion of his music videos. Nayman is an authoritative guide to this treasure trove of all things Anderson.

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