Hard Eight sometimes feels like one of those creative exercises where you’re given a prompt – just the start of a story – and then you have to fill in the rest. It feels borrowed. Like a dozen popular 90’s movies all rolled into one. And yet it doesn’t feel too full. It feels kind of incomplete, actually. Like we only got part of a story. And yet I still liked it. I liked getting thrown into this world with these characters. Sometimes I find myself wondering where they are now. I don’t really need to know, but it’s fun to think of them as part of their own little cinematic universe.
It feels like these characters belong in another movie somewhere, and this is where they come when they’re not on that other screen. Funny enough, many of these actors appear in Anderson’s later films. So it’s almost like those future characters are reincarnations of these characters. Twisted souls reborn, forever paying for the sins of their former lives.
This is the first Paul Thomas Anderson film. And while it’s surprising that this man would go on to make some of the great masterpieces of our time, it’s also surprising that this is his first feature film. It doesn’t feel like a first film, despite its flaws. It feels like something a recently established filmmaker would take a chance on after a couple early successes. PT just skipped a couple steps. Just like he did between Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood.
You can already see Paul Thomas Anderson building a core group of collaborators. John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Baker Hall, and Melora Walters would all go on to star in multiple Anderson films. And he already seems more than capable of pulling the right performances out of his actors. Baker Hall in particular is fantastic in this. As a character-actor, he can often be pigeonholed into the same kind of roles. But I think the thing that makes this different is that in this movie…the character actor role is the STARRING role, instead of as a supporting player. He gives a strangely empathetic and layered performance that ends up defining the whole film.
After Hard Eight, Paul Thomas Anderson could have gone in so many different directions. He could have turned into a Jonathan Demme, or a Guy Ritchie, or maybe tried to emulate Quentin, or the Coen Brothers. Hell, maybe he could have shied away from his edginess, lost his ambition, and just settled for whatever he could find. But no. He didn’t. He built a new column in the hall of directordom. He forged his own way. He fused all those different paths – all those different influences – into one mixed up wonderful journey. And Hard Eight is just the beginning of a long road of exploration and experimentation, of multiple facelifts and reformations of self. And the greatest part is…the journey’s not even over yet.