Inside the Strange, Romantic Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson

As an unruly teen, in danger of getting kicked out of his  fifth private school in a row, Paul Thomas Anderson assured his guidance counselor that he’d one day make it as a famous director. “I’m going to win the Academy Award,” he’d told her. By all accounts, there was no Plan B. 

Now, some forty years later, Anderson may be on the precipice of achieving his childhood wish. One Battle After Another (2025), his tenth feature film, has received a whopping 13 nominations going into  next month’s Oscars, including for Best Picture, which it is widely expected to win. The recognition feels long overdue. Anderson’s films have been nominated 41 times by the Academy, but so far have only ever bowed for acting, cinematography and costume design. Yet many consider Anderson the best American director  working today. Arguably, he’s never made a bad picture.  

Consistently kinetic, emotionally complex, thematically rich and phenomenally acted, Anderson’s filmography seems to exist in a league of its own. Eschewing the instantly recognizable (and easily imitated) visual styles of Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson (no relation), Anderson nevertheless hails from the same generation of slick, bombastic filmmakers who came of age during the golden years of video rentals. He’s a cinemaniac, whose own work is deeply indebted to the VHS tapes that raised him. His wide-ranging filmography does follow certain rules, however: Stories tend to be set within the San Fernando Valley, where Anderson was born and raised, and take place well  before the arrival of the internet (making Leonardo DiCaprio’s selfie-snapping moment at the end of One Battle a major break for the director). 

For me, what makes a Paul Thomas Anderson film are the relationships. Often earth-shattering and sometimes dangerous, these dynamics provide contrast and clarity to the stymied, dysfunctional lives his characters face at home. Though Anderson has directed some of the most willful protagonists in film, love and family are the two areas where all control is ceded. Despite his frequent cynicism, the possibility of love as a form of salvation remains especially alive in his movies. I don’t think it’s too much to say that Anderson, one of our most clear-eyed and sensible filmmakers, is also a hopeless romantic. 

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

In 2002, Anderson had just gotten out of a long relationship with alt-pop goddess Fiona Apple. Now alone on Saturday nights, he turned to Adam Sandler movies to cheer himself up. As the great Roger Ebert once noted in his own incisive review of Punch-Drunk Love, Sandler’s work during this era was in the comedic dregs: churned out studio comedies, childishly stupid yet often needlessly violent, as if they were concealing some inner rage. Anderson took that formula and flipped it on its head, creating one of the strangest and most unforgettable romantic comedies of all time.

Punch-Drunk Love stars Sandler as Barry Egan, an extremely awkward individual who sells novelty bathroom appliances from the back of a San Fernando warehouse. Terrified of socializing and prone to outbursts of anger, Barry consoles himself with a far-fetched plan to amass frequent-flyer miles through a promotion on pudding cups. Everything changes when he’s introduced to Lena (Emily Watson), whose arrival in his life seems like a breath of fresh air. Taking cues from classic Hollywood romances, Anderson doesn’t explain their connection (or what Lena sees in Barry) so much as draws these two together like gravity, allowing their magnetism to remain mysterious.

A crucial scene with Barry’s extended family goes a long way towards making this romance convincing. Barry has seven sisters (Anderson grew up with four) who often show up in the film like a flash mob, disrupting his peace at home and work. When they invite him over one night for a spaghetti dinner, the effect is so claustrophobic that Barry punches his way through a window within five minutes of arriving. These may well be the only women Barry’s ever spoken to before Lena, and their overbearing insistence on how he should live helps explain his bottled up emotions. After a night with his family, all Barry really needs is someone who will let him be himself. 

There Will Be Blood (2007)

One of the great films of American history, Anderson’s adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927) stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a wildcat prospector who strikes it rich in Southern California. Driven only by greed, he adopts a young deaf boy early in the film to make himself more appealing to the residents of Little Boston, his latest prospecting target.

With a gruesome story built around such falsified family relations, There Will Be Blood is Andeson’s most cynical picture to date, a vision of a world in which money overrules every other human bond. Like oil, it seeps into and corrupts the values meant to anchor society—most notably faith, embodied in Little Boston’s preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), Plainview’s primary adversary. As Sunday and Plainview go at it in a battle between higher purpose and primal need, Anderson deftly draws them together into a web of family ties, as Plainview’s adopted son falls in love with Sunday’s sister. It’s not much of a romance, given the exile, blackmail, and murder that pockmark the rest of this film,  but it’s telling that Anderson stages his battle between irreconcilable forces on the domestic scale. Presaging the question of paternity at the heart of One Battle, Anderson’s magnum opus speculates that the most destructive aspects of American life are at their core a family affair. 

Phantom Thread (2017)

A film about engulfing appetites and oppressive table manners, Phantom Thread was Anderson’s first to be set outside San Fernando Valley, trading its sunny climes for grey 1950s London. He probably needed the change of scenery to justify someone as uptight as Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis, again), a dress designer for royalty, who needs everything in home and life to be exactly a certain way. While his sister (Lesley Manville) manages the House of Woodcock to his exacting specifications, Reynolds finds his own formula for creative consistency stifling, and high-tails it to his house in the country. There, he meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a server at a local inn. Reynold’s inability to restrain himself from ordering the entire breakfast menu while she waits on him immediately bespeaks the film’s connection between hunger and desire.

Reynolds soon sweeps the uncultured and awkwardly wilful Alma out of the countryside and into the heart of London’s fashion world, using her as a model. But while her presence initially seems beneficial to his output, it makes for some disastrously awkward breakfasts—he can’t stand the way she butters her toast. The tension between her fresh, rough-hewn sensibility and his incredibly manicured demeanor is finally resolved in a gorgeously idiosyncratic twist, involving a case of deliberate food poisoning. Anderson’s delightfully strange study of artistry, domination and the creative benefits of self-destruction once again finds love as the way out of an intractable problem, even if the solution brings one to the brink of death. 

Licorice Pizza (2021)

Possibly the director’s most personal film to date, Licorice Pizza is named after a defunct Los Angeles record store, one that for Anderson, evokes “a Pavlovian response […] of being a child and running around.” He clearly got into plenty of high-jinks as a kid. The son of an in-demand voice actor with an outlandish sense of humor, and one of nine children from two marriages, Anderson received a Betamax camera at age 12, along with a lot of latitude at home. As a teen, he snuck onto the studio lots, made up contests to film elaborate spectacles, and borrowed his dad’s 1964 Studebaker Avanti without a license. Though he cemented his reputation with somber, highbrow films like There Will Be Blood and The Master (2012), this boyish rambunctiousness is still present across his oeuvre.

Licorice Pizza captures this feeling without necessarily retreading Anderson’s own escapades. It follows teenaged actor and aspiring entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) who has his life turned upside down by a head-over-heels encounter with his class picture photographer Alana (Alana Haim). Once again, after the two lock eyes, the film refuses to entertain the idea that they might not be together forever—though this time, Anderson allows for far more obstacles,  including a ten year age gap. The plot of Licorice Pizza is straightforwardly silly: Gary and Alana hatch harebrained schemes, get taken hostage by D-list Hollywood celebrities, are mistaken for murder suspects, and chase one another down Ventura Boulevard. None of it leaves a lasting impact on their lives, but that’s the point of youth—endless opportunities to make mistakes. Anderson’s fusion of the expansiveness of boyhood with a surprisingly solid romantic dyad makes this film the ultimate nostalgia trip.