Magnolia

viewed February 4, 2000 at Sony Metreon

viewed January 22, 2000 at Sony Metreon

For full information about this film, click here

Magnolia starts out just as perfectly as any film I can remember, with a setup so off the wall that one can't possibly predict what the movie will be about.  Coincidences, is the idea the narrator offers, and we see the theme played out in three swiftly exposited stories that are too bizarre to be true.  They are urban legends, stories that are larger than life, existing far beyond the normal and yet centered in the reality of human thoughts and fears.  Fabrications so outrageous that they can't possibly be fabricated, they exploit the basic desire unique to the human race: to believe.

Magnolia blasts into the stratosphere with these three masterfully recreated urban legends and then blows into a bravado mass introduction of the major characters whose day will be charted for the next three hours, and who have little at all to do with urban legends.  Their lives, read under the context of urban legends, are mild in the amazement they provoke.  The boy genius who pissed in his pants during a game show.  Another boy genius who lost his brains after being hit by lightning.  The straightlaced cop who fell in love with a cokehead.  The mysogynistic self-help sex guru who does have a mom and dad after all.  Although these stories seem to have lost the thematic connection with their prelude, they certainly sustain the incipient feeling of disbelief and awe -- and will do so from start to finish.  

The amazing level of cinematic intensity carried throughout the film is becoming the hallmark of one of America's most talented young filmmakers, Paul Thomas Anderson.  Having already shown a talent for generating a dense, distinctive atmosphere with a flair for the dramatic throughout Boogie Nights, he turns his jets up a few notches and churns out a relentless procession of high-power melodramatic scenes, each one swinging for the fences, each one crying out to be looked at in amazement.  I love this film.  I love it for its rawness, its boldness, its unabashedness.  It is bravado filmmaking bar none, letting it all hang out, going for broke, pushing audiences to the limit of their mental and emotional logic.  While his half-dozen interwoven stories about dying old men, wounded grown-up children and a couple of caretakers trying to bring it all together may not read as outlandishly as most good urban legends would, their to-the-limit presentation captures the spirit of the genre, being too incredible to be ignored, too unbelievable to be disbelieved.

From one standpoint, the storytelling seems all so horribly generic, which makes its success all the more amazing.  Anderson, I believe, exploits several dominant modern mass entertainment genres and transforms them into a unified sensation of astounding impact.  First there is sustaining of amplified melodrama, borrowing scenarios from soaps, that breeding ground of improbable plots.  He then takes those scenes to their limit, milking them for their emotional impact with a talented cast trying on a broad range of approaches, from subdued to neurotic to hysterical. He amplifies the effect with a pulsating Jon Brion score that often insists on staying in the foreground of scenes, and, peppered with songs by Aimee Mann, both comments on and enhances the omnipresence of soap opera music.  

Within the larger melodramatic arc he inserts his homages to other TV and film genres: there is a hilarious but nerve-wracking send up of Cops and other real-life TV shows, and a kids vs. adults game show whose brilliant exaggeration (one question requires a child to sing an aria from the opera Carmen in French) and subsequent dismantling demonstrate a brilliant insight into what game shows are all about.  Then there is the sing-along that comes from out of nowhere, but fits exactly where it is, recalling the impeccably timed catharsis of movie musicals.  But an even greater catharsis awaits to rain on the characters at the point in the film when their suffering and pain can be pushed no further.  It is the mother of all disasters in a decade driven by disaster epics.  And, as Stan Klawans points out in his smart defense of the film, this disaster, unlike so many of the others, has a point -- bringing out something in each of the characters' inner natures.  

Throughout all of this you are being carried aloft by the joy of Anderson's filmmaking, as well as the feeling that you are also sharing in the joy of his cast and crew, who have taken these wacky setups to heart and have given them their all, making them not only real but hyperreal.  The collective frisson of restless camerawork, surprising but seamless editing and an urgent soundtrack gives the impression of a cinematic symphony, a modern update of Wagner's theory of constant music -- this is constant cinema, complete immersion into the world of the film, with no let up until the end.

There aren't enough acting kudos to go around for this film, which is probably the dilemma the Academy felt when trying to single out who among the ensemble to nominate.  Tom Cruise is obviously the most striking performance as Frank T.J. Mackey, professional telemarketer of mysogyny, who storms into scenes and comes out with fists swinging.  With this role, Cruise seems to do to his previous macho-man roles what Anderson does with genres: send them up and then squeeze them out for some painful, truthful essence.  After a whilrwind of an interview with a TV journalist (played by April Grace, who pushes all of Cruise's buttons perfectly), he staggers way trying to carry on, acting on the brink of oblivion, as his tortured past comes knocking on his self-assured persona.  Cruise's persona always had that uneasiness about him concerning something unspoken, jeopardizing his control, but never has that been more dramatically charged as in this character. 

Julianne Moore also storms through the movie, but under a cloud of regret and self-hatred, her conscience having caught up with her for marrying a dying man for his money.  She strides through the movie utterly vulnerable and emotionally naked; it is a difficult performance to pull off, and she blazes through it with a ragged glory.  

Almost as if she were Moore's understudy, Melora Walters breaks through as the coke-snorting daughter of an abusive game show host - broken and wounded, she gathers sympathy in spite of her loathsome behavior throughout the film, sniffing lines at every opportunity and bawling at people to leave her life.  Walters' eyes, hungry and vulnerable, lend her character all the weight it needs to be cared about.

Her father, played with a besotted dignity by Philip Baker Hall goes through a gamut of phases -- from being the awkward visitor to his daughter's apartment to the smooth game show host of "What do Kids Know?" only to give way to the cancer that is breaking him down from inside.  With a delicacy to his character's appearance that increases as the day goes on, Hall handles his demise with poignancy, although as he falls he is shown up for what he is: an exploiter of children, in more ways than one.

Anderson had a lot of guts to put Jason Robards in a deathbed for the entire movie, having him mutter most of his lines incoherently.  Then again, Robards had a lot of guts to play the role, especially in a long, rambling monologue that somehow says a lot with its regretful wisdom to underscore the entire film.

Stan Blackman breaks out as a kid game show champion who, besides knowing the answer to every question, is wise beyond his years, and everyone else in the movie.  His flipside comes in the form of William H. Macy, a former kid genius, now stuck in the body of a man.  Though his scenes resonate least with the rest of the film, they are lovely in themselves, with their slow, slurring evocations of longing and regret.

In spite of the incredible effort put out by this tremendous cast, I must tip my hat off to two people in particular.  John C. Reilly is the heart of this movie.  He's enough to make you love cops.  His character seems to start as a parody of the incoherent platitudes spewed by officers on "Cops", but quickly he emerges as a bastion of simple, conservative strength, bound to decency and honesty. He is a man that has sworn himself to serving people, and apparently takes that yearbook answer to heart -- as if he's missed the joke.  There is a scene where he confesses that he lost his gun, in front of Melora Walters (whose character has problems Reilly can't even begin to match) and it hits the right note: that as silly as a lost gun may seem relatively, both Walters' and the audience can sympathize with him and his genuine sense of failure.  It's a scene that, like Reilly's character, is disarming and completely sincere.

Then there is Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a beautifully low-key, selfless role. He is also bound to serving, and cares deeply for the Jason Robards character as his final hours slip away.  He also gets to play some more with the perverse side of his screen persona (a la Happiness); in one scene he phones in an order of porno mags to the local 7-Eleven.  But then we see why he does it, and it transforms our idea of both Hoffman and his character, that both are capable of such depths to their souls.  Hoffman's emotions are completely transparent, and yet there is a surprising level of underlying strength, as he resolves to fulfill his keep's dying wish.  To do so he must break through a telemarketing operator to speak to the CEO, Robards' long lost son, in a dialogue that is self-referential but still moving: 

"I know what you're thinking.  That this is like the scene of a movie, where a dying man asks to see his long lost son.  But, you know, this is that scene.  And I think the reason they have those scenes is because, they do happen."

As Hoffman's line shows, Anderson carries over the '90s legacy of metafictional layers of irony (as well as elaborate narrative structures, and detached manipulation of characters), but infuses them with films that are as sentimentally humanistic as anything on the Lifetime channel.  These are films that know they are just films, and yet they reinvigorate the belief that films have the power to move us in spite of their artifice -- that in fact it is their artifice, larger-than-life, that moves us in ways real life never could.  There was a time, not too long ago, when the overwhelming majority of people really believed that what happened in the Bible was all true, and that miracles happened daily.  Now it seems that we've scientifically disproven most anything amazing that comes our way.  And yet we go to movies -- because that's one of the few places left to us where we can believe in the unbelievable.  

Miracles happen in this movie.  Not just in the way of neat special effects visualizing impossible events, but in the way the inner beauty of the characters makes us care profoundly about what happens to them, so that when the Amazing Event finally happens to them, our souls are lifted.  This movie challenges us to believe throughout its unbelievableness, and we believe because it hits at the crazy truth of our needy souls. We leave Magnolia believing.  

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