On the specific tension in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) between its love for its subjects and its honesty about them.

Boogie Nights is Anderson's most obviously Scorsese-influenced film: the rise-and-fall structure, the voiceover, the period music, the ensemble cast. But the comparison obscures what Anderson is doing that Scorsese wouldn't do.

Scorsese's gangster films are about men who choose to live outside the law and pay the price. Anderson's film is about people who didn't quite choose anything — who drifted into the porn industry the way they might have drifted into any other world that offered them belonging — and the price they pay for drifting.

The film's love for Dirk Diggler and the people around him is genuine and it creates a specific kind of sadness when things go wrong. These aren't characters the film is judging. They're characters the film is mourning.

The magnum opus sequence in the third act — which I will not describe in detail for people who haven't seen it — achieves something extraordinary: it makes you feel simultaneously the specific desperation of the characters and the general strangeness of human hope. Anderson is better at that combination than any other American director of his generation.