Unlike athletes such as boxers, film directors rarely have a clearly identifiable “prime” or peak period. Cinematic history abounds with instances of filmmakers achieving success later in their careers, as well as those whose early promise quickly faded. If a period of maximum creative output can be identified for filmmakers, however, it typically occurs after they’ve gained significant experience but before the demands of age begin to impose compromises. Paul Thomas Anderson has now entered this phase, alongside contemporaries like Darren Aronofsky, Wes Anderson, and Christopher Nolan, who are his closest peers in Hollywood regarding age, influence, and artistic ambition.
For anyone discovering the world of cinema in the late 1990s, Paul Thomas Anderson’s presence was undeniable. While his debut feature, the tightly plotted and modest genre film Hard Eight (1996), went largely unnoticed, his subsequent ensemble drama Boogie Nights (1997)—a sprawling 1970s melodrama fueled by substance abuse and featuring flashy camerawork—was impossible to miss. A decade later, the period piece There Will Be Blood (2007), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as early 20th-century oil prospector Daniel Plainview, solidified his reputation as a major director. He became recognized as a historian and chronicler not only of the fates of drifting individuals but also of the United States’ melancholic, hidden life.
Anderson has never lacked ambition, and like any grand artistic endeavor, this has prompted debate about whether his work is truly brilliant or merely showy. Taken together, his films offer a broad narrative of the 20th-century American experience, saturated with classic national themes such as lives of quiet desperation and the relentless struggle against an unchangeable past. This elevated ambition is evident not only in the content of an Anderson film but also in its form. Even his “smaller” films, like Hard Eight and Punch-Drunk Love (2002)—his only movies under two hours—are magnified by his visual acuity and knack for powerful imagery.
Think of the stark image of alienation that opens Punch-Drunk Love: Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan compressed into the far corner of a widescreen frame, hunched over his desk in a bare warehouse, a strip of blue paint on a blank wall perfectly matching his bulky blue suit. Anderson has stated that John Sturges’s commentary track on the LaserDisc of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), the first MGM production shot in CinemaScope, taught him everything he knows about film directing. He favors large and deliberately “cinematic” formats, including wide-gauge 70mm and anamorphic Panavision lenses.
At a time when widescreen is often used as an automatic default, he stands among a select few filmmakers who truly compose their shots for it. Yet, the very boldness and scope of Anderson’s aesthetic are paradoxically linked to what can make his films frustrating experiences. His talent and imagination are unquestionable, as is the noticeable effort that accompanies his inevitable pursuit of the transcendent—a strain viewers perceive precisely when they ought to be experiencing the transcendence itself.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s American narratives often display a distinct inclination towards the Pacific Coast. California serves as the central hub of Anderson’s cinematic world, featuring prominently in almost all his movies, with the broader Los Angeles area holding particular significance. (His upcoming film, Phantom Thread, set in 1950s London, will be an exception to this trend.) Anderson himself is a first-generation Californian; his father, Ernie, originally from Lynn, Massachusetts, was deployed in the Pacific with the U.S. Navy during World War II, a detail mirrored by Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Freddie Quell, in The Master (2012).
In the mid-1960s, Ernie Anderson achieved cult status in Cleveland as Ghoulardi, a beatnik, Van Dyke-bearded host of a late-night horror movie show known for satirizing the unhip suburban town of Parma, Ohio. He later moved west, where he amassed a modest fortune as the recognizable voice of ABC, settling his family in Studio City within the San Fernando Valley, a locale arguably akin to Los Angeles’s own “Parma.”
A recurrent theme in many of Anderson’s films is a complex blend of fascination and revulsion towards the less picturesque areas of his native city—a landscape Pauline Kael, in her 1984 review of Alex Cox’s Repo Man, aptly described as “the LA of freeways and off ramps and squarish pastel-colored buildings that could be anything and could turn into something else overnight.” Anderson consistently demonstrates a strong predilection for retail showrooms and commercial establishments.
Examples include the “Super Cool” stereo store envisioned by Buck (Don Cheadle) in Boogie Nights; Solomon & Solomon, a furniture wholesaler (and one of many Old Testament allusions) in Magnolia (1999); the competing small businesses of Egan and Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in Punch-Drunk Love, who respectively own a novelty toilet-plunger company and D & D Mattress; and the downtown department store in The Master, where Quell briefly works as a portrait photographer.
These environments often serve as literal or metaphorical backdrops from Anderson’s own formative years, underscoring the deeply autobiographical nature of his cinematic work; for instance, the scene in Magnolia depicting a deathbed vigil for Jason Robards’s cancer-afflicted Earl Partridge closely mirrors Anderson’s personal experience of his own father’s lingering illness and death.
In his final moments, Partridge utters the confession, “I let my love go…”, a plea that suggests a lingering hope for redemption. Observing these moments of confession, one is consistently impressed by the profound yearning for healing present in Anderson’s films—a desire for absolution from past wrongs, for acceptance, and for reintegration into the world in a state of complete well-being. Even the usually cynical Plainview is compelled to admit moral failure, exclaiming “I’ve abandoned my boy!” to a seemingly divine presence he fleetingly appears to fear.
Before Barry Egan can fully embrace Lena’s love in Punch-Drunk Love, he must undergo a process of purification and confess the difficulties he caused by contacting a phone-sex line, reminiscent of Levin revealing his diaries to Kitty in Anna Karenina. Instigating regret is a core element of the “processing” cross-examination employed by Lancaster Dodd in The Master, who frequently asks, “Do your past failures bother you?” This identical aspiration for absolution or relief from life’s burdens fuels the Aimee Mann sing-along in Magnolia, whose chorus admonishes, “It’s not going to stop ’til you wise up”—with “it” presumably referring to the relentless tribulations of existence itself.
Anderson characterizes his outlook as influenced by a casual Catholic upbringing, and his films often explore themes of sin and atonement, juxtaposed with a uniquely Californian enthusiasm for the perceived remedies of personal therapy and self-help. These two viewpoints converge in the often unfulfilled, yet redemptive, potential of human connections. In Hard Eight, Philip Baker Hall’s character, Sydney, a card-counter, assumes the role of mentor and protector to John C. Reilly’s unfortunate John Finnegan, a dynamic that is later revealed to be Sydney’s attempt to atone for transgressions committed decades earlier on the East Coast.
The evolving relationship between Sydney, John, and John’s wife, Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), establishes a pattern of makeshift family structures frequently seen in Anderson’s subsequent films. Subsequent instances include Julianne Moore’s drug-addicted character “adopting” Heather Graham’s “Rollergirl” in Boogie Nights; Plainview accepting the orphaned son of his deceased prospecting partner in There Will Be Blood; and the foundling Quell becoming an apprentice to Dodd in The Master. These types of healing bonds serve as a counterpoint to the pervasive spiritual emptiness and crisis prevalent in Anderson’s portrayal of the American West, where the grand promise of Manifest Destiny ultimately dissipated.
Anderson’s Californian characters, much like the uprooted retirees in Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust, discover that “sunshine isn’t enough.” This pervasive sense of stark panic is most palpable in Magnolia, a film that itself virtually reek of desperation, a sprawling folly seemingly groaning under its own ambition. It feels as if its creator frantically attempted to incorporate every thought and emotion, perhaps believing it was his final opportunity to tackle such an expansive project.
The outcome is a peculiar paradox: simultaneously overwhelming and insufficient. While the script’s deliberate use of doubling—such as two dying television moguls with animal names, two drug-addicted women battling hysteria, and two child prodigies from different eras—highlights an active conceptual intelligence, Magnolia occasionally comes across as a disjointed omnibus, assembled by talent of wildly different caliber. The portrayal of game-show host Jimmy Gator’s (Philip Baker Hall) botched suicide attempt, following accusations of child molestation, is notably clumsy, suggesting Anderson’s reluctance to fully confront the implications of his own narrative. (His evasive resolution saves Gator’s life but pointedly excludes him from the redemptive final montage.)
Magnolia finds its sole true stroke of genius, however, in the character of Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), undeniably one of Anderson’s most memorable creations. Mackey, a male-supremacist pickup artist guru, teaches his “Seduce and Destroy” technique, seen incanting phrases like “Respect the cock and tame the cunt” to a roaring audience of aspiring alpha males. Anderson has noted the character was partly inspired by Ross Jeffries, author of Secrets of Speed Seduction Mastery.
Mackey’s creation predated the widespread use of terms such as “negging” and “kino” in popular culture. (Tragically, a burlesque scene depicting Mackey demonstrating his methods—arguably the funniest sequence Anderson has ever filmed—was omitted from the movie’s final cut.) Viewed from 2017, Mackey’s character feels remarkably prescient. He emerges as a progenitor for men’s rights activism, complete with “trigger liberal snowflakes” rhetoric, operating ahead of his time during the decadent late Clinton years.
Confidence men feature more prominently in Anderson’s post-Magnolia films, as his focus shifts from spiritual yearning itself to those who exploit it. This trend is evident in Punch-Drunk Love, a transitional film where Anderson abandons the emphatic camerawork and lengthy tracking shots characteristic of his early, Scorsese-influenced work. Instead, he emphasizes the quiet ambience of observed downtime: the drone of warehouse lights in the lonely pre-dawn, Barry Egan’s aimless circling in a perpetually unfinished apartment that can never truly become a home.
Through the antagonistic characters portrayed by Sandler—a solitary, anger-prone sad-sack—and Hoffman—a blackmailing con artist who targets the vulnerable—Anderson establishes a dynamic that has since defined his subsequent films. Plot increasingly yields to character, with tension arising from the clash of contrasting archetypes: the passive versus the predatory, the clumsy versus the charismatic, the victim versus the bully, the naïf versus the operator.
This strategy is further refined in There Will Be Blood, a sweeping narrative exploring industrial ambition and fervent entrepreneurial belief. Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Plainview immediately establishes him as another of the director’s iconic protagonists, characterized by his broad-brimmed hat, bristling dark mustache, and an coal-black glint in his eyes. While Plainview seems to perpetually accumulate enemies, none is as reviled as Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a smooth-faced young preacher leading a modest congregation at the Church of the Third Revelation in the remote Californian town of Little Boston. The town’s name subtly implies the unadulterated transfer of New England Puritanism westward.
Eli’s character is drawn from “Eli Watkins” in Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, a work inspired by the Teapot Dome scandal and, specifically, by one of its central figures, oilman Edward L. Doheny. Anderson’s addition of the surname “Sunday” was almost certainly a nod to Billy Sunday, a former Chicago White Stockings outfielder who left baseball to preach the “revealed Word” and became a prototype for the contemporary superstar evangelist.
In the film’s extended postscript, set in 1927, Eli reveals his attempts to establish himself as a radio personality, somewhat emulating Aimee Semple McPherson. Anderson was undoubtedly familiar with the Pentecostal preacher McPherson, an Angeleno legend in her era, renowned for her weekly radio broadcasts of sermons—including faith healing sessions—from the Angelus Temple in Echo Park. Eli Sunday, alongside characters like Frank T.J. Mackey, appears to materialize fully formed from the mythic crucible of American capitalism and evangelism—the very matrix that spawned both vast fortunes and sprawling megachurches.
In The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson explores a postwar America that deviates from the expected narrative of buoyant triumph and liberal consensus. Instead, he portrays a landscape populated by psychologically scarred individuals, adrift and struggling to forge a clear identity after their costly, hollow victories. Joaquin Phoenix plays Quell, an aimless, alcoholic drifter who drifts into the sphere of Dodd, a self-proclaimed prophet reminiscent of L. Ron Hubbard in the nascent stages of spreading what would become Scientology. Their codependent relationship, a constant exchange between genuine feeling and performance, mirrors the core dynamic of Scientology as a new American religion centered on self-creation. Furthermore, it subtly alludes to another influential postwar ‘cult’ that captivated Hollywood: Method acting, championed by teachers like Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner.
Watching Dodd guide Quell through psychic exercises designed to unearth past traumas, one could easily imagine being in the Actors Studio. Phoenix, in particular, seems to deliberately evoke the spirit of Montgomery Clift – specifically, the broken Clift whose face was surgically reconstructed after a severe drunk-driving accident. Both actors deliver intensely physical performances. Phoenix’s Quell is a dark, scraggly figure, often seen with his arms akimbo, a sunken ‘pigeon chest,’ a jagged sneer instead of a smile, and a stiff, awkward gait that amusingly suggests poor hygiene. He serves as a perfect, inverted counterpart to Hoffman’s Dodd, who appears as a robust, golden-haired, overgrown cherub whose true motives remain elusive.
Though appearing as a study in contrasts, these men are, ironically, more similar than they realize—a fact Anderson subtly emphasizes in a memorable scene where they confront each other from adjacent jail cells, devolving into primal, animalistic barking. This is a memorable scene, and Anderson consistently shines at crafting such distinct, powerful moments. However, these scenes often feel like self-contained units, disconnected from a broader narrative framework. This perhaps explains the lingering sense of dissatisfaction his films often evoke in me. His films clearly demonstrate their creator’s enjoyment in observing the friction and sparks generated by pitting antithetical characters against each other. Yet, once that intense interaction concludes, one is often left with little more than ephemeral dust.
As they separate for the final time after a long period as mentor and protégé, Dodd serenades Quell with a softly sung version of the romantic classic, “(I’d Like to Get You) On a Slow Boat to China.” Reflecting on The Master‘s release in Film Comment, Kent Jones observed that the film “threatens to come apart at the seams,” yet argued that this very “courting of danger is exactly what makes [Anderson’s] films so exciting.” This unexpected, even homoerotic, serenade exemplifies the type of artistic risk Jones refers to. Such last-minute, audacious gambits are a signature of Anderson’s filmmaking, with the most renowned example being Magnolia‘s ending, featuring a shower of frogs foreshadowed by billboards displaying “Exodus 8:2.”
However, where some perceive daring bravado, I detect a subtle desperation—a sense that Anderson, having perhaps written himself into a narrative corner, resorts to a grand gesture as a means of artistic escape. In a way, this approach is entirely fitting. As a dramatist, Anderson appears most at ease exploring the emotion of desperation. These ‘bet-the-house’ moments, where he seems willing to gamble the entire integrity of his film, parallel the extreme commitments of his deeply flawed characters. Nevertheless, part of the exhilaration stems precisely from the perilously real risk of artistic misstep. The initial half of There Will Be Blood, an often-silent meditation on the arduous extraction of mineral wealth from harsh, desolate land, stands as one of the most captivating examples of sustained filmmaking in Anderson’s body of work. Conversely, the film’s conclusion—Plainview brutally bludgeoning his adversary Sunday to death—is as underwhelming as the first half’s fascinating revelation of Daniel’s embittered core had been captivating.
While Plainview’s act of personally committing the murder is consistent with his character – given his hands-on approach to all his ventures – his assumption of a preacher’s mantle (“I am the third revelation!”) in his ultimate triumph over Sunday (now a budding entrepreneur) certainly aligns with Anderson’s dialectical screenwriting. This stylistic choice often sees seemingly opposing figures reaching a climactic synthesis. However, this finale feels less genuinely dangerous and more merely illustrative; much like Dodd’s sudden song in The Master‘s final moments, its emotional impact is limited to the predictable resolution of a formula.
Both films excel significantly in their initial chapters, meticulously sketching the individual psychologies of their subjects through striking visuals that appear to organically emerge from their inner worlds. At times, There Will Be Blood approaches the simultaneously elemental and insinuating quality found in Claire Denis’s 1999 film, Beau Travail – a comparison that places Anderson alongside a true cinematic visionary. Yet, he has never achieved an ending as unexpectedly fluid and powerful as Beau Travail‘s frantic dance of self-destruction.
Inherent Vice (2014), set in Los Angeles around 1970, serves as the concluding film in Anderson’s chronological trilogy exploring cultish American beliefs. It effectively dissolves any expectation of a clear resolution amidst the elaborate fictions of the Human Potential Movement era. Once more, Anderson employs his characteristic diptych structure: following pairs like the Victim and the Conman, or the Capitalist and the Preacher, and the Bum and the Demagogue, Inherent Vice presents the Hippie and the Square. These roles are filled by Phoenix as burnout private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello, and Josh Brolin as Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, an LAPD officer with a flat-top haircut and an active Actor’s Guild membership. Both characters are independently investigating a missing-persons case, which quickly spirals into a tangle of corrupt Los Angeles real estate deals, LAPD misconduct, and a bizarre conspiracy involving “Big Dentistry” and the Aryan Brotherhood. These are but a few of the many ‘cults’ that flourish in this chaotic setting, alongside the notorious Manson family and “Chryskylodon” – an Esalen Institute-like asylum linked to drug cartels, specializing in reintegrating addicts they themselves hooked back into conventional society.
Paul Thomas Anderson seamlessly inhabits the Los Angeles depicted in Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, embracing its inherent mystery and disheveled romanticism. Like many of Anderson’s works, Inherent Vice centers on broken male protagonists, with Emily Watson’s nuanced portrayal in Punch-Drunk Love standing out as a rare, complete female character, a credit to her performance. It’s a shame, as Anderson has previously depicted heterosexual relationships with remarkable emotional depth and intimate realism. Prime examples include the raw, draining encounter between Doc Sportello and his “ex-old lady” Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) in Inherent Vice, and the pivotal, dual-meaning “shoot” scene involving Dirk Diggler and Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) in Boogie Nights.
Sportello and Shasta’s connection blossomed during the fading glow of the Sixties, but she has since embraced a more conventional life. The film’s narrative begins in the wake of the counterculture’s decline, as its diverse sub-groups, once vibrant and spontaneous, face infiltration by an establishment subtly promoting its own religious resurgence—a “return to normalcy” with a distinctly Nixonian flavor. Sportello’s persistent investigation ultimately leads him to the enigmatic plutocrat and puppet master Crocker Fenway (Martin Donovan). Unlike the visceral robber baron Plainview, Fenway represents a new breed, one who consistently maintains an immaculate public image.
While Inherent Vice offers a protest against the corporate elite’s reassertion of dominance, it lacks the raw, guttural intensity of Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981), a film that likely influenced it. Moreover, it never quite achieves genuine comedic brilliance. Nevertheless, the film possesses a beautifully lilting and layered atmosphere. It stands as Anderson’s most visually stunning work, imbued with a pervasive sense of bittersweetness, or what he has aptly described as a “faded postcard” effect. Its immersive quality is such that one can almost discern the distinct aromas of hash, patchouli oil, and forgotten food. During Inherent Vice‘s release, Anderson himself articulated his filmmaking philosophy to a festival audience: “I never remember plots in movies, I remember how they make me feel and I remember emotions and I remember visual things that I’ve seen.”
The film perfectly captures a specific brand of melancholy: akin to a wrong turn on the freeway, driving past your intended destination, and ending up disoriented in the desolate parking lot of a forgotten strip mall, questioning where you went astray. It strives to encapsulate the precise historical moment when the idealistic “All You Need is Love” philosophy was brutally exposed by the Manson murders, transforming an era of free-spirited optimism into a pervasive paranoia. Time, however, is relentlessly forward-moving. The only constant is the emergence of new figures, new slogans, and new panaceas—be they palliatives, miracle cures, or restorative tonics—all promising a return to a lost golden age or an imagined past glory.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films often evoke a poignant nostalgia for a better past, much like a faded postcard. He consistently portrays 20th-century America in a state of perpetual downfall. Boogie Nights, for instance, depicts an initial Eden of free sex, drugs, artistic ambition, and warm, film-shot pornography, eventually succumbing to addictive depression, industrial production, and the harshness of video.
In The Master, the demobilized Quell seeks escape from the deadening normalcy of civilian life when he stumbles upon Dodd’s yacht. Punch-Drunk Love uses the impersonal architecture of the San Fernando Valley—including a humorous scene where Barry Egan gets lost in featureless hallways—to echo the anti-modern sentiment of Tati’s Playtime (1967). Finally, There Will Be Blood features Plainview, transformed into a monster by his singular pursuit of wealth, though it’s unclear how much soul he had to begin with.
Is America equally lost? Intellectuals often describe national life as an ever-worsening “hellscape,” and Anderson’s filmography, readable as an extensive critique of consumer capitalism’s impact on the American spirit, has likely benefited from this perception. His films suggest that this system generates a pervasive longing, which is then exploited by predatory charlatans and con artists. As Joanna Newsom’s evocative voice-over explains in Inherent Vice, “As long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers.” Anderson’s America is a land of both deceivers and the deceived, a concept echoed by figures as varied as Melville, Twain, and P. T. Barnum, and a sentiment many Americans hold about their own society, even while disagreeing on the specific power dynamics.
Given the skepticism toward artists in America, it’s fitting that Anderson himself is often debated as either a profound sage or a mere charlatan. However, the evidence suggests he is a gifted yet fallible filmmaker whose ambition sometimes outstrips his execution. His career showcases a continuous negotiation between mainstream appeal and arthouse sensibilities, often grappling with overly abstract themes while simultaneously demonstrating a meticulous eye for detail. This controlled tension aligns him with esteemed mid-century “prestige” directors such as John Sturges or George Stevens (whose Giant (1956) notably served as a clear template for There Will Be Blood). Nevertheless, since the maximalist Magnolia, Anderson has increasingly seemed to deliberately weaken his own cinematic structures, obsessing over minute, perhaps irrelevant details to an almost ostentatious degree, like inscribing obscure lowercase text on a billboard.
Anderson’s often-intermittent connection with a wide audience can be attributed to his creating films in a country where many believe its best days are in the past, and within a medium whose fans similarly lament a perceived decline from a happier past to a less vibrant present. Anderson’s own cinematic “golden age” seems to be 1970s New Hollywood. While his early ensemble dramas were often compared to Robert Altman’s, since There Will Be Blood, Anderson has increasingly taken cues from Stanley Kubrick, whose monumental shadow falls over Anderson’s generation of filmmakers, just as Hitchcock’s did over the one before. Seemingly more concerned with achieving artistic grandeur than mere competence, he has embraced the role of a national chronicler, delivering melancholic narratives about America’s destiny. When asked about Pynchon’s worldview in a 2014 profile, Anderson pondered, “Has America really lived up to its potential? Let’s keep hoping.” This question applies not only to the remarkable film industry in Southern California but also to Paul Thomas Anderson, the accomplished local director himself.
