No new filmmaker of the late twentieth-century reached for that brass ring like Paul Thomas Anderson. While most seemed content to ape Tarantino, Anderson made clear his aspirations to join the looming likes of Kubrick, Altman, and Malick: filmmakers of preternatural vision and ambition. Although Anderson never made any bones about his film-geek touchstones (the most reductive of critics labeled Boogie Nights his “Scorsese,” Magnolia his “Altman,” There Will Be Blood his “Kubrick,” and so on), Anderson’s films were still preciously personal and wholly original in their own rights. Each new release was an event, especially as his schedule slowed to a crawl in the twenty-first century.
As fresh as Boogie Nights and Magnolia still feel, both of those pictures are now over two decades old, so a book such as Adam Nayman’s Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks feels long overdue. It is not the first analytical dive into Anderson’s oeuvre—George Toles did one a few years ago—but it is the first to my knowledge that combines deep analysis with the visual luxury of a Taschen tome.
Nayman’s text is admirable for attempting to decode Anderson’s deliberately cryptic work, but I often found myself at odds with him. The first thing to give me pause was the author’s identification of The Phantom Thread, the biggest stylistic outlier in Anderson’s filmography, as his favorite of Anderson’s films. While it’s a fine enough picture, it lacks Anderson’s peculiar, love-it-or-hate-it voice, and an appreciation of that film over the others signaled that Nayman might not fully appreciate that voice. Indeed, his mostly uncritical analysis is most critical of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, the two films richest in Anderson’s weirdly juvenile, unabashedly empathetic voice (Nayman passes no judgments on the amateurish Hard Eight or the tiresomely rambling Inherent Vice—easily Anderson’s two weakest pictures as far as I’m concerned). Nayman’s puritanical criticism that Anderson should have punished the pornographers of Boogie Nights signaled that the writer and I are not on the same page. Ultimately, I found most Nayman’s ideas pretty sturdy, though wordily expressed.
So Masterworks works best for me as a sort of visually oriented coffee table book. Of course when it comes to Anderson’s indelible images of flaming derricks, prosthetic penises, and falling frogs, there’s still no substitute for the films.
