DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
Paul
Thomas Anderson
PRODUCERS
Paul Thomas Anderson
Joanne Sellar
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Robert Elswit
MUSIC
Aimee Mann
Jon Brion
EDITOR
Dylan Tichenor
CAST
John C. Reilly (Jim Curring)
Tom Cruise (Frank T.J. Mackey)
Julianne Moore (Linda Partridge)
Jason Robards (Earl Partridge)
Philip Baker Hall (Jimmy Gator)
William H. Macy (Quiz Kid Donnie Smith)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Phil Parma)
Melinda Dillon (Rose Gator)
Melora Walters (Claudia Wilson Gator)
Alfred Molina (Solomon Solomon)
Felicity Huffman (Cynthia)
Jeremy Blackman (Stanley Spector)
Luis Guzman (Luis)
Henry Gibson (Thurston Howell)
Michael Murphy (Alan Kligman)
Orlando Jones (Worm)
Emmanuel Johnson (Dixon)
April Grace (Gwenovier)
Miriam Margolyes (Faye Barringer)
Ricky Jay (Narrator)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 188m
U.S. release: December 17, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other P.T.
Anderson films
reviewed on this website:
- Boogie
Nights
- Punch-Drunk
Love
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If I were to begin this as
a normal movie review, and then it went on and on for thousands
of words, full of sometimes dazzling paragraphs that didn't relate
to each other, and if this review then somehow turned into a
haiku written in German about squirrels, how would you respond
to it? If you were feeling generous, you might allow that it's
fitfully interesting (after all, nobody's ever attempted this
before), but you also might point out there's a good reason
nobody's done it before.
Something like that happens in (and to) Magnolia, the
new film by the madly ambitious Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie
Nights). For long stretches, even the long bad stretches,
I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt: Nobody could call
Magnolia timid or ordinary. But the cumulative effect
of three hours and ten minutes of disjointed emotions, random
despair, and freak occurrences that get right in your face and
dare you not to take them seriously ... well, it's exhausting,
even punitive. Anderson wants to grab us and hold us, but that
isn't the same as involving us; he seems to prolong the scenes
and shuffle the storylines simply because he can. Anderson
loves the bullying control of being a movie director.
In Los Angeles, a variety of people move through their meaningless
days, nursing old wounds, sinking into fits of self-loathing.
In outline, Magnolia is a lot like Robert Altman's Short
Cuts, in which flawed, hapless people were caught in the
pitiless hands of fate -- and of Altman. Anderson is more gentle;
he gives his actors moments they can sink their teeth into. But
they're just moments -- they play like exercises designed
for an acting class, and they hardly make sense; they're not
organic to the movie, but then nothing else in the movie is,
either.
The movie has many mystifying touches: many references to a Biblical
passage prophesying the movie's climax; free-floating Masonic
imagery; a little black kid who delivers an obscure rap that
supposedly solves the mystery of a dead man in a closet. There's
also a prologue telling us that strange things happen, and the
climax has a comparable Ripley's Believe It or Not tone;
but what that has to do with the movie's repeatedly stated theme
(come to terms with the past; be kind to one another) is anyone's
guess.
Those who respond to Magnolia
will have enough to discuss and dissect for months. A good deal
of Anderson's banquet is enjoyable, but there are too many dishes,
too much for one sitting, and some of us may not feel like returning
for seconds. For all of Magnolia's energy and virtuosity
(whatever else you can say about him, Anderson is a dynamic director,
even if his particular dynamism is borrowed from Scorsese as
well as Altman), for all of its success at evoking a sense of
simultaneity and the uncanny, we just don't spend enough time
with any given character to become involved in his or her story.
Anderson busily sets up many "literary" parallels.
There are two dying old fathers, both of whom work or worked
in television (Anderson's own father, Ernie Anderson, was the
Cleveland kid's-TV horror-movie host Ghoulardi). One, Earl Partridge
(Jason Robards), is estranged from his son (Tom Cruise), a dynamic
how-to-pick-up-women lecturer probably patterned on Ross Jeffries.
The other, Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), hosts a quiz show
pitting kids against adults, and is hated by his daughter
(Melora Walters in the film's most touching performance), a cokehead
who develops an uneasy bond with a good-hearted cop (John C.
Reilly).
There is also a former quiz-show whiz kid, Donnie Smith (William
H. Macy), now a bitter nowhere man who apparently lost his smarts
when hit by lightning (Anderson does love these sick jokes of
God's); a current whiz kid on Jimmy Gator's show is browbeaten
by his own father into winning, just like Donnie was. Why all
this elaborate parent-child venom? As in Boogie Nights,
Anderson lays on the vituperative scenes of conflict, the bathetic
moments of reconciliation. By many recent press accounts, Anderson
loved his dad (who, like the movie's two dads, had cancer) but
is estranged from his (still-living) mother; if he has issues
with her, I wish he'd work them out somewhere other than in his
films.
Writing about Eugene O'Neill's mammoth play The Iceman Cometh,
Pauline Kael noted that "banality in depth can let loose
our common demons," and Anderson may have been trying for
that. But what he ends up with is banality at length --
punishing length. Magnolia is like a season's worth of
soap-opera vignettes, acted vigorously by a sincere cast. (Some
of the actors don't come off. The usually dependable Julianne
Moore, as Earl's viciously miserable young wife, knocks herself
silly trying to do something real with her sketchy character;
her meltdown scene in a pharmacy is among the worst-written monologues
I've ever heard in a serious film.) The most painful part of
Magnolia is that Paul Thomas Anderson isn't a no-talent;
you can't dismiss him. He has a genuine gift for melancholy,
and some of the pieces of Magnolia are first-rate. But
this film and Boogie Nights keep veering between wildly
contrasting moods: dynamic energy and sodden depression; exaltation
and despair. And the stories he's telling just don't justify
the workout he puts us through.
If Magnolia were shorter, it might make a fascinating
folly; if it were longer -- say, an eight-episode series
for HBO -- Anderson might at least have time to dig deeper into
the characters, who remain representative ciphers expressing
themselves in too-explicit speeches. At times the movie seems
to tremble under the strain of trying not to crack apart, and
at the end, the film completely loses it -- it's as if Anderson,
desperate for a spectacular finish and an easy way out of his
dozen plot threads, had opted for the most arrogantly nonsensical
climax possible. Cue the frogs! Is Anderson insane? Or did his
ambition just get the better of him? Magnolia is a mess,
but it's somehow encouraging: It takes a gifted director to make
a movie this extravagantly foolish.
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