The Many Chosen Families of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Filmography
The cinematic trajectory of Paul Thomas Anderson has been nothing short of astonishing in its breadth. His films are vast, versatile, inventive, and exponentially expansive. His films shift across timelines and continents, from early 20th-century oil fields to the fluorescent haze of the San Fernando Valley, from 1970s porn mansions to the world of London couture. His aesthetics range wildly, from ensemble dramas to intimate romances, sprawling epics and complex character studies, each film arriving as if cut from an entirely different cloth, playful in genre and form, unwilling to be pinned down. But despite the stylistic differences in the director’s films, and despite their lack of links on a chain at face value, all of his films are bound to one another by a subtle yet vivid throughline. They are tethered by a deep yearning for connection, particularly family, each film in their own way arguing that family is something we craft, shape, and choose.
Again and again, his characters emerge from fractured or absent homes, shaped by broken foundations and estranged bloodlines, and set off in search of new bonds. They seek intimacy and structure, the promise of belonging, and the fragile architecture of “family.” These characters are often looking for something larger than life, something outside of themselves that could rescue them from obscurity or loneliness, like adult film stardom in Boogie Nights, the fleeting possibility of true love in Punch-Drunk Love, or the unshakable power of faith in The Master. In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Plainview seeks fortune and empire, oil wells, land deeds and legacy to fill the void. In Magnolia, each figure aches for forgiveness. In Phantom Thread, Reynolds Woodcock reaches for artistic immortality through perfection in dressmaking. What unites these quests, no matter how grand or mundane, is the way they circle back to the same essential need: to belong to someone, to something, to a home of one’s own making.
From the start, Anderson has shown us people trying to build homes out of inhospitable spaces. Hard Eight (1996), his modest debut, begins in a Reno diner, where Sydney, a seasoned gambler, notices a young man down on his luck. He takes John under his wing, teaching him how to survive in the rootless casino world. What begins as a pragmatic exchange slowly deepens into a father-son bond, with Cynthia, John’s new love, completing the improvised family unit. The casino floor, liminal and transient, becomes their home through the kinship they carve out of isolation. Boogie Nights (1997) takes this blueprint and inflates it into a flamboyant epic. The porn industry of the late ’70s is reframed as another surrogate household, with Jack Horner as the indulgent patriarch, Amber Waves as the nurturing yet wounded mother, and Dirk Diggler as the prodigal son. Their San Fernando Valley mansion is both dysfunctional and deeply caring, a sanctuary for misfits excluded from mainstream society. Over time, the warmth of this chosen family curdles under the weight of ego, addiction, and greed. As the ’70s slip into the harsher 1980s, the household splinters. Dirk’s eventual return to Jack is less about career than the simple, desperate need to be welcomed home, a pattern of exile and return that echoes throughout Anderson’s work.
Now, Magnolia (1999) is born from the shadows. This is my personal favorite of Anderson’s films, three sprawling hours that feel both intimate and overwhelming, a patchwork of absurdity and sadness stitched into an achingly human epic. It’s a film that first floored me with its audacity, its ability to move between operatic emotion and surreal spectacle. It stayed with me because of the fragile, trembling humanity at its core. Where Boogie Nights presented an extended family gathered under one roof, Magnolia scatters the family unit into fragments, a mosaic of broken households stretched across the San Fernando Valley. Anderson paints a portrait of estranged parents and neglected children, dying patriarchs clinging to their legacies, cycles of abuse and addiction, and the kind of twisted taboos and buried secrets that eat at the foundations of family life. The film is haunted, above all, by the failures of bloodline. Fathers who cannot love their children, children who cannot forgive their fathers, the inheritance of shame and absence.
Make no mistake, though, Magnolia is not all despair. Its beauty lies in the flashes of grace that puncture the darkness. Strangers step in as family figures when blood ties collapse. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Phil Parma, a nurse tasked with caring for the dying television producer Earl Partridge, extends compassion far beyond his professional duties, embodying a selfless love absent in Earl’s own relationship with his son, Frank (Tom Cruise). John C. Reilly’s Jim Kurring, a clumsy but earnest police officer, offers Claudia Gator, traumatized by her father’s abuse and locked in cycles of cocaine and shame, patience and kindness, a willingness to stand beside her even as she pushes him away. These moments of tenderness suggest that family, in Anderson’s view, a wholly deliberate decision to care when one has every reason not to.
Punch-Drunk Love (2002) distills Anderson’s representation of family into something compact and deeply intimate. At its center is Barry Egan, an odd and lonely man suffocated by the overwhelming presence of family as opposed to its absence, with seven sisters constantly reducing him to a child long after he has become an adult. The supposed “safety” of the family household becomes a claustrophobic environment of teasing and nagging. It is through Lena Leonard, a woman who quietly sees him beyond his shame and awkwardness, that Barry discovers an alternative. Their love is abrupt, and tinged with the film’s off-kilter rhythm, but in Lena’s gaze Barry encounters recognition for the first time. She treats him as whole. In her embrace, intimacy provides the sanctuary that blood ties never could. Punch-Drunk Love reframes the idea of home as both a colorful feeling and a sanctuary we create when we are finally seen for who we are.
A massive pivot from Punch-Drunk Love, comes in the form of There Will Be Blood (2007). Here, Anderson turns the theme of family into something corrosive and merciless. Daniel Plainview, the prospector-turned-oil baron, adopts H.W. after a workplace accident leaves the boy fatherless. But this act of apparent kindness is never free of calculation. H.W. is folded into Daniel’s business persona, paraded before townsfolk and investors as the sweet face of his oil company, proof that he is a family man. From the beginning, the adoption is less about love than about image. When H.W. is injured in a drilling accident that leaves him deaf, Daniel grows increasingly alienated from the boy. The house they share is an empire under construction, and once H.W. is no longer useful, Daniel sends him away.
Daniel’s household embodies the corruption of family through capitalism, while Eli Sunday’s church mirrors it through religion. Eli positions himself as a patriarch of faith, offering his flock belonging and salvation in exchange for submission and spectacle. The dynamic between Daniel and Eli becomes a battle between two warped families, one ruled by greed, the other by manipulation. By the end of the film, Daniel’s mansion is cavernous and empty, echoing with absence. He has secured wealth and power but obliterated the possibility of love. In one of Anderson’s bleakest statements, There Will Be Blood suggests that when a family is governed by power, be it financial or spiritual, destruction follows. What remains is only isolation, a man who has everything but belongs nowhere.
The Master (2012) pushes Anderson’s exploration of family into darker, more unsettling terrain, examining how the human hunger for belonging can be manipulated. Few structures embody the complexities and dangers of chosen family more vividly than a cult, where intimacy, devotion, and hierarchy intertwine. Freddie Quell, a WWII veteran, is introduced as a man adrift. He is violent, alcoholic, compulsive, and with no tether to a stable life. His one attempt at a “real” family slips through his fingers while he is overseas. Into this void enters Lancaster Dodd and his organization, The Cause, a cult-like religious movement that functions as a chosen family for lost souls. The bond between Freddie and Dodd is the emotional core of the film, an intimate and volatile tender relationship. For a time, The Cause becomes Freddie’s home. But inevitably, this strange bond strains, and Anderson asks whether true belonging is ever really possible, or whether it is always a kind of illusion. The film leaves us with the haunting sense that home may be less a place we arrive at than a longing we carry with us.
After the grand, corrosive scale of The Master, Anderson shifts into the haze of Inherent Vice (2014), where the dream of the counterculture flickers out into corruption. Doc Sportello is searching for his ex-lover, Shasta, but what he’s really chasing is the ghost of a vanished community. Home here is less a place to return to than a fading memory slipping away. That sense of home as something simultaneously desired and dangerous is sharpened in Phantom Thread (2017). The House of Woodcock looks orderly, almost familial in its ceaseless rhythms and structures of formal care, but beneath its surface it suffocates those who inhabit it. Reynolds rules with precision, his sister Cyril enforces the rules, and the atelier functions like a family, each day riddled with monotonous routine and devotion to the perfectionism of the man of the house. The arrival of Alma unsettles the household, forcing intimacy into a space that resists it.
In Licorice Pizza (2021), Anderson lightens the air. Instead of the claustrophobia of Reynolds’ atelier, we get the improvisational family of youth. Gary and Alana move fluidly between roles, crafting a bond on their own terms. The San Fernando Valley becomes their playground, a home defined by possibility, where connection is buoyant, fragile, and joyful precisely because it doesn’t have to last forever.
I have yet to see Anderson’s latest film, One Battle After Another (2025), but I know that it pushes these ideas into the realm of the political thriller. On its surface, it is the story of Bob Ferguson, a former revolutionary drawn back into danger when his daughter is kidnapped. Some have read it as Anderson’s most “genre” film, closer to a suspense thriller than the character-driven dramas he is known for. But even within the heightened action and larger political canvas, the same concerns pulse beneath, that yearning for connection, the way family is both inheritance and choice, and the lengths to which people will go to protect it.
It is such a satisfying and marvelous thing to observe the question that endures through a director’s entire filmography, with many shades and nuances, but the question of family, home, belonging, and love persists. This question is a little bead that remains intact, hurtling and bouncing through all of these vastly different films. Paul Thomas Anderson refuses a simple resolution about family. The nuclear family as we know it has proven itself as something strange and difficult to make sense of. Family is never purely nurturing nor purely destructive, but always complex. It is this tension between the comfort we crave and the chaos it inevitably brings that gives Anderson’s work its power, and keeps drawing us back to his restless, deeply human stories.
Audrey Weisburd is an arts and culture writer from Austin, Texas, currently living in Brooklyn. She also writes short fiction and poetry. She shares her work on Instagram @audrey.valentine.
