It would be hard to find a career as revered as that of Paul Thomas Anderson. After releasing his first film in 1999, at just 26 years old, he was hailed as an emerging genius. Every film released since then has produced a similar hysteria amongst film bros and awarding bodies alike, each new work greeted as a modern masterpiece. Now, in the wake of the release of One Battle After Another, the cult of Paul Thomas Anderson is revving back up. There’s no better time then to look back at his vast, diverse filmography and consider what it is that makes them great.
My first encounter with PTA was the 1999 epic drama Magnolia, a huge ensemble number about nine interconnected lives in California’s San Fernando Valley. Across a single day, Anderson follows characters adrift in modern America. They are isolated and frustrated, entangled in relationships that are endlessly complicated: between father and son, between partners, and between strangers briefly encountered, we watch a desperate struggle for meaning and connection. Magnolia is three hours long, yet somehow it feels too short, a feat that seems only achievable by a director like PTA, whose writing balances intense melodrama, nail-biting action and humour, drawing out some of the best performances of each member of its star–studded cast. Tom Cruise’s turn as Frank Mackey, a male dating coach who laments the degradation of men in society and orders his fans to “Seduce and destroy!”, is particularly haunting— it left me feeling like Anderson had somehow reached out into the hellscape of male influencers a la Andrew Tate two decades before their emergence.
Anderson’s work is full of characters like Mackey: enigmatic, ambitious men whose existence and carefully constructed identities are threatened by monumental change. In 2007’s There Will be Blood, Daniel Day Lewis stars as Daniel Plainview, a tough, ambitious oilman in 1898 whose capitalistic aspirations are threatened by the appearance of a young, enigmatic preacher, while 1997’s Boogie Nights follows the rags–to–riches rise, and eventual fall, of a young porn star navigating the hedonistic chaos of 1970s Los Angeles. Both, while employing wildly different but equally breathtakingly captured settings, seem indicative of Anderson’s interest in cutting to the heart of the capitalistic drive of modern America, how ambition can create and destroy men who refuse change.
But the brutality and ambition of these films are balanced, in all of Anderson’s work, with an attention to the power of real, life changing love, and what we do to get it. Paul Thomas Anderson on love is my favourite Paul Thomas Anderson, the subtlety of his direction capturing quiet moments in between communication that express unbelievable tenderness. Whether in a set of glances exchanged across a dining room in 2017’s Phantom Thread, a man breaking into dance at the supermarket in Punch-Drunk Love, or a sprint through Los Angeles towards the object of adolescent obsession in 2021’s Licorice Pizza, Anderson seems able to articulate a tenderness between people that is beyond what words can capture.
Phantom Thread is, perhaps predictably, my favourite of Anderson’s filmography. It contains within it elements of his earlier work: Daniel Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock is a character with echoes of Anderson’s men before him; an eccentric, ambitious genius, who lives by an unchanging routine. Where Day-Lewis’ performance in There Will be Blood was one of unyielding intensity, in Phantom Thread, he is a man succumbing to the vulnerability of intimacy, learning that love requires change. There is an intimacy in the direction of the film that pulls you entirely into the world of its central couple: the camera pushes close into their faces under candlelight, the sounds of dresses shuffling in studios and needles pushed through fabric punctuating silences between the lovers communicate the whole, vast scope of their love and what they must sacrifice to sustain it. To me, it’s a film about what it takes to make space for love in our lives, the terror and joy of truly knowing another person and being known in return. Ambition and tenderness: it is Anderson at its finest.
Whether turning his attention to the scope of American capitalism or to the quiet power of love, Paul Thomas Anderson has a vision of humanity that implores you to pay attention. If you haven’t yet, then tune in now, because the release of One Battle After Another shows that he has no plan to slow down. I, for one, am glad.
“Paul Thomas Anderson & Daniel Day-Lewis-2” by Jürgen Fauth is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.