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Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Jason Robards, Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman,
John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall, Melora Walters, Jeremy
Blackman, Melinda Dillon
USA, 1999
Rated R (language, sex, violence, drugs)
SLICES OF LIFE
I fully realize that Magnolia is not for everyone. Yet, if you weren’t moved by Paul
Thomas Anderson’s jaunty, complicated, moving, and wacky ensemble drama, I
wouldn’t understand and I would feel sorry for you. For three hours (that actually feel
like three hours, no more and no less), Anderson creates sheer beauty on screen. He
sees parallels between his characters, he recognizes how much coincidence is a part
of life, and he also looks at how one’s own decisions have an equal impact on the
outcome of things. The situations and lives he creates here may seem pretentious,
slapdash, and banal to many viewers, and maybe they are, but yours truly was nearly
moved to tears by Anderson’s film. And you’ve got to love when a filmmaker sort of
makes fun of his own film’s pretenses by having an utterly outrageous, fantastical
climax.
The great Chicago critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called Magnolia "a wonderful mess." That it is. Magnolia shifts back and forth between the stories of its ten principal characters, and it may cause a little emotional vertigo for a viewer who is not anticipating the film to be what it is 95% of the time- a catharsis of unpleasant emotions that are standard for this type of ‘90s movie, but are unsettling when experienced in a three hour, almost non-stop eruption. The film seems to be a collection of all the yucky family themes Hollywood has ever talked about, and all the sadness is thrown around and shared by all ten of the movie’s briefly but deeply examined characters.
Two dying men seem to be at the center of all these intertwining lives: Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), who is afflicted with bone cancer and is the host of a long-running game show called What Do Kids Know?, and Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), who is dying of lung cancer and is the producer of a number of L.A. TV shows, including the one Gator hosts. Magnolia connects its characters by blood, by chance meetings, and by the way their lives and situations are parallel. The two dying men have many similarities: they both have a form of cancer, they both are involved in television, they both have failed in winning the love of their children, they both have cheated on their wives, they both feel regret… and so on. Earl Partridge’s estranged kid is Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), who is also involved in the T.V. world. He hides behind a sexist persona with his Seduce and Destroy infomercials that teach bachelors how to conquer women like prey and respect their manhood. He has run from his past and his father. Jimmy Gator’s disapproving daughter is cocaine-addicted Claudia Wilson Gator (Melora Walters), who fears judgment, affectionate intimacy, and reality. Earl’s wife, the young Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore), harbors guilt about her relationship with Earl and has become suicidal. She cheated numerous times on Earl, and he, similarly, cheated on his earlier wife who died years ago. Jimmy’s wife, Rose (Melinda Dillon), would probably be happier if her husband did not feel the need to purge long-hidden secrets of cheating to her two months before he is expected to die.
Not everyone in Magnolia is part of an examined biological family. Earl’s nurse, Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), searches desperately for Frank T.J. Mackey so his patient can see his distant son one last time. Policeman Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly) roams the streets, dropping in on neighborhood disturbances, needing to administer help. He has no love life and wants a calm relationship with someone, but falls for Claudia Gator, who is strung out on drugs, her stereo full blast, who is a wreck and anything but calm. Parma and Kurring are the two innocents, but neither are simply bystanders of all the emotional crimes committed in the film.
Two more despairing characters almost completely mirror each other. Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), a past contestant and winner on What Do Kids Know? reached fame and public success at an early age. Now, his life revolves around unrequited love-at-first-sight for a bar tender with braces. Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), the current whiz kid of What Do Kids Know?, discovers that the only way to win his father’s attention is through the money he wins from the game.
It all builds up to a much-discussed ending that many people have called ludicrous and laughable, while others claim it an inspired event of Biblical proportions that mirrors the film’s prologue of weird coincidences and occurrences through time. I agree with the latter judgment.
Paul Thomas Anderson may have intended the film to have only one message, but, to me, Magnolia is multi-layered thematically. Obviously, what Anderson is getting at is that there are unseen and unknown connections between everyone. Magnolia says that every little detail on earth is an integral part of the outcome of our meticulous plans. Another basic theme of the film is you can’t go forward into the future or enjoy the present if you don’t confront the past. There is also a T.V. theme many reviewers have discussed- is the tube poisoning our lives, our fates, our families? And then the movie touches on the sins of the fathers- the difficulty of being a parent, the difficulty of being a child. The film delves into the self-absorption we know as infants that seems to carry into our adult lives. Our plans are caught up in how things will affect us, rarely in how things will affect the people around us, and probably never about the people we don’t know. And yet, Magnolia reminds us we have the power to affect the people continents away from us of whom we have no knowledge. Ultimately, Magnolia looks upon life and the world as a puzzle, realizing that the smallest and the largest of events will throw off even the most certain of our predictions. Magnolia itself is a sort of puzzle: it is never completely clear until the very end, and even after the unanticipated finale, you still may not get it if it didn’t work on you.
This is Paul Thomas Anderson’s third feature; his previous effort being the seedy Boogie Nights. I can’t say if Magnolia is his best film because I haven’t seen his other movies, but this drama is extremely ambitious. It’s not that no one’s ever done this overlapping story thing before; Robert Altman may be the king of this film style. Magnolia is constantly compared to Altman’s Short Cuts. While Anderson’s film does not have the fluidity of Altman’s Nashville, or even a clear anchor like the film industry of The Player, Magnolia manages to do things for me that Nashville never did. Pauline Kael famously praised the Altman classic, saying that his strategy did not set up conflicts. To me, a film that has no conflicts is an interesting experiment, but nothing more. Magnolia creates problems within a circle of people, and concludes that sometimes our lives are completely out of our control. The very idea that the people we meet in life and the families we get stuck with and the lives we lead is pure chance has always fascinated me, more so than the mannerisms of singers and politicians in America’s country music capital.
Magnolia is alive and vibrant, hysterical and deeply moving, yet its problem may lie in its jumpy pulse and operatic melodrama. Though the film’s ceaseless use of hyper-emotions never bothered me once, on retrospect, it may seem to some that Anderson took a bunch of traditional problems and turned them up to full blast to get an effect. Every scene seems to be one of those Academy Award moments, and maybe the film worked on me because those kinds of scenes always draw me in. But Magnolia is hardly about individual characters or situations at all, but, to reiterate, about the fact that for every person with a problem, there is someone with the same problem, and the fact that in one day, so many troubles will find a resolution and so many peaceful lives will find suffering. Some may say that Magnolia proves life revolves around nothing, but, though it may seem bombastic and absurd, I think the film affirms the existence of God.
As for those Academy Award moments, it is a measure of Magnolia’s stellar cast’s achievement that they don’t end up flat and silly, but beautiful and penetrating. Every one of the ten characters under Paul Thomas Anderson’s microscope is served by a great actor and performance. Not all of the ten characters are looked at as often or as profoundly as one would like (Melinda Dillon doesn’t get to do much since she portrays Rose Gator, the only one-noted pawn of the ten in Magnolia’s game), but the cast is, at worst, adequate, and, at best, sensational. Everyone is likely to find their favorite performances of the shimmering ensemble: mine were those of Julianne Moore (one of the most interesting and busy actresses working today), William H. Macy, and Philip Baker Hall. Tom Cruise gives, arguably, his best performance here and it is when his character is forcing himself to bottle up emotions that he is most effective. John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman play nice guys and they do such fine jobs, though their characters’ relative stability compared to the others may cause the two performances to be ignored unjustly. Melora Walters plays Claudia as if she were living in her own surrealistic, drugged up bubble and its a fascinating, though jarring, turn. Jason Robards effectively emulates the breathing and vocal patterns of a dying man, and I think Jeremy Blackman is even better than Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense in expressing a sense of fear, loneliness, and confusion. Magnolia’s cast is arguably the highlight of the film.
Magnolia and Being John Malkovich are the closest the 1999 films I saw got to masterpiece quality. Both are innovative, otherworldly movies that deal with worldly problems. While Malkovich was superior in terms of achieving a sense of completeness and is probably the better film, Magnolia is the one I’m going to have a harder time getting over. No, nothing totally new has been done with Anderson’s achievement, but the film is such a flood of emotion, I gave into the movie’s pungency whole-heartedly. Furthermore, it introduced me to the talent of Aimee Mann, who wrote and performed Magnolia’s beautiful, moody songs. Films like these make me lose my responsibility as a film critic happily. I guess I’m supposed to criticize the movie’s bumpy editing, its unrestraint. Paul Thomas Anderson and his cast and crew have created movie magic and I can only find words of praise for their depth and creativity. Scrutiny got lost in the pouring rain.
By Andrew Chan
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