Honestly, a lot of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies — including his Oscar-nominated comedy Licorice Pizza — feel like extended music videos. Sometimes, they basically are: Magnolia, released in 1999, was Anderson’s attempt to adapt his friend Aimee Mann’s music into a movie. (The results suggest it was a good idea.)
Licorice Pizza’s needle drops, woven into the heady emotional landscape of a 1970s summer in the Valley, feel like pleasant little heart-thunks, every single time. In composing the weird tinkly soundtrack for Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Jon Brion mixed original music with a song from Robert Altman’s 1980s film Popeye, to delicious effect. And, of course, Boogie Nights (1997) plays like one long party, so laden with bangers that they had to release the soundtrack in two volumes.
Maybe this explains why Anderson’s music videos, in turn, seem like films. In some cases, they actually are short films: there’s Valentine (2017), a fly-on-the-wall documentary in the studio with the LA-based pop-rock band Haim, and Anima (2019), a collaboration with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, which plays like dystopian sci-fi with a hopeful side. But even the more traditional-length ones — dozens of which he’s been directing since the ’90s with artists including (ex-girlfriend) Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, Radiohead, Haim, Aimee Mann, and Michael Penn — feel like mini-films bearing his unmistakable fingerprints.
What are those fingerprints? Anderson’s films always feel a little smudgy, a little off-kilter, with main characters who often seem a bit out of place in their world — a perfect match for musicians.
In The Master (2012), loner Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is jaggedly inappropriate and unpredictable, a man who seems on the verge of exploding or shriveling at any unexpected moment. Two years later in Inherent Vice, Phoenix is now a strung-out detective who’s a day late and a dollar short while life is racing on ahead of him. Boogie…