Paul Thomas Anderson

Contemporary Film Directors

by George Toles

Since his explosive debut with the indie sensation Hard Eight , Paul Thomas Anderson has established himself as one of contemporary cinema's most exciting artists. His 2002 feature Punch-Drunk Love radically reimagined the romantic comedy. Critics hailed There Will Be Blood as a key film of the new millennium. In The Master , Anderson jarred audiences with dreamy amorphousness and a departure from conventional story mechanics. Acclaimed film scholar and screenwriter George Toles approaches these three films in particular, and Anderson's oeuvre in general, with a focus on the role of emergence and the production of the unaccountable. Anderson, Toles shows, is an artist obsessed with history, workplaces, and environments but also intrigued by spaces as projections of the people who dwell within. Toles follows Anderson from the open narratives of Boogie Nights and Magnolia through the pivot that led to his more recent films, Janus-faced masterpieces that orbit around isolated central characters--and advance Anderson's journey into allegory and myth. Blending penetrative analysis with a deep knowledge of filmic storytelling, Paul Thomas Anderson tours an important filmmaker's ever-deepening landscape of disconnection.

Genres: Film

232 pages, Paperback

Published July 18, 2016

Reviews

[Kyle Burley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intelligent and insightful but too academic to be an enjoyable read. However, it did send me back to the films with renewed interest, especially The Master.

[Brendan Molloy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful close reading of Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, and The Master. Toles pulls from diverse sources as he analyzes the films. The Master was maybe the least engaging of the three, but that could be due to it being less fresh in my mind.