Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, Don Cheadle, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán, Joanna Gleason, Ricky Jay, Philip Baker Hall, Alfred Molina, Thomas Jane, Michael Penn. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson. Cinematography: Robert Elswit. Production design: Bob Ziembicki. Film editing: Dylan Tichenor. Music: Michael Penn.

Paul Thomas Anderson's breakthrough film is a reworking at feature length of a short film he made in 1988, and it has the earmarks of what was to come from him as writer-director: complex narratives with large casts, featuring some of the same actors from film to film. It also launched Mark Wahlberg out of his career as a rapper and underwear model into success as a film actor and producer. Wahlberg plays a naïve layabout who gets into the porn business under the screen name Dirk Diggler. He is mentored by the filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) and by the actress Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), who acts as a kind of den mother for the various porn stars under Horner's aegis. The camaraderie of this little company is tested by the passage of time, as the feel-good 1970s turn into the anxious 1980s.

Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

Ronny Cox, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Burt Reynolds in Deliverance

Ed: Jon Voight
Lewis: Burt Reynolds
Bobby: Ned Beatty
Drew: Ronny Cox
Old Man: Ed Ramey
Lonnie: Billy Redden
First Griner: Seamon Glass
Second Griner: Randall Deal
Mountain Man: Bill McKinney
Toothless Man: Herbert "Cowboy" Coward
Sheriff Bullard: James Dickey

Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: James Dickey
Based on a novel by James Dickey
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Art direction: Fred Harpman
Film editing: Tom Priestley

I haven't read James Dickey's novel Deliverance, but I think I can see why Dickey grew so angry at director John Boorman's revisions on his screenplay version of the book. The film never quite decides what it wants to be: an adventure story, an environmental fable, or a story about a clash between cultures. It works best as an adventure story, which is in the nature of film, and somewhat as a clash of cultures. The four suburban hotshots who arrive in the backwoods of northern George for a weekend adventure are from the outset rude and condescending to the people who live there year-round, and of course they get their comeuppance in extreme ways. The irony is that the one man in their company who sympathizes with the locals is the one who fails to survive: Drew brought along a guitar, not the bows and arrows that Ed and Lewis bring with them, and he interacts musically with one of the supposedly "inbred hillbillies" in the celebrated "Dueling Banjos" sequence. Drew is also the only one who tries to hold out for facing justice after Lewis kills one of the mountain men who attack them. Lewis argues that if they stood trial for killing the man, they'd face a jury of the man's peers; Bobby doesn't want the story of his being raped to get out, and Ed passively goes along with them. Better backgrounding on the four adventurers might have given more substance to their characters and their ideas, and the villainous mountain men are monsters out of nightmares rather than actual human beings, so the debate over justice seems a little out of focus. But it's mostly the environmental issue that falls by the way: There's little sympathy shown for the people who face seeing their homes flooded -- one of them even says it's the "best thing that ever happened to this town" -- an almost no feeling for the wilderness that will be sunk beneath the man-made lake. Boorman would later make The Emerald Forest (1985), a more environmentally conscious film also about the construction of a dam, set in the Brazilian rain forest.

Citizen Ruth (Alexander Payne, 1996)

Laura Dern and Kurtwood Smith in Citizen Ruth

Ruth Stoops: Laura Dern
Diane Siegler: Swoosie Kurtz
Norm Stoney: Kurtwood Smith
Gail Stoney: Mary Kay Place
Rachel: Kelly Preston
Harlan: M.C. Gainey
Dr. Charlie Rollins: Kenneth Mars
Blaine Gibbons: Burt Reynolds
Jessica Weiss: Tippi Hedren

Director: Alexander Payne
Screenplay: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
Cinematography: James Glennon
Production design: Jane Ann Stewart
Film editing: Kevin Tent
Music: Rolfe Kent

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim," said George Santayana, a statement quoted by Chuck Jones in commenting on his inspiration for Wile E. Coyote's futile pursuit of the Road Runner. It applies equally well to most of the characters in Citizen Ruth, with the exception of Ruth herself, whose only clear aim, getting high, she never forgets. Director Alexander Payne and co-screenwriter Jim Taylor crafted an audacious satire on political fanaticism, focused specifically on the American furor over abortion, but still applicable 22 years later to almost all of the many political controversies, from gun control to collusion with foreign powers, that dominate our divided discourse. Ruth Stoops is a hopeless case, too addled by whatever she can get her hands on to produce a state of narcosis and too much a product of societal breakdown to ever be the focus of anybody's cause. But when a judge, learning that Ruth is pregnant with a fifth unwanted child, suggests that he might go easy on sentencing her if she'll have an abortion, she is first snapped up by right-to-life advocates and then blunders her way into the opposing camp of freedom-to-choose proponents. Eventually, her decision (which Ruth is incapable of arriving at rationally) begins to be swayed by a bidding war between the two groups, each of which offers her money -- a rather paltry $15,000 that seems like a fortune to the indigent Ruth -- either to have the baby or to abort the fetus. There are those who find the plight of Ruth no laughing matter, and they're right. But Payne manages to stay on the far side of reality in his treatment of the subject, and he benefits from a company of actors capable of teetering on the edge of caricature without actually lapsing into it. Laura Dern manages to find something sweetly naive in Ruth that makes her headlong self-destructiveness both touching and funny. She is a hopeless case, just as a resolution of the abortion debate seems hopeless, too.