Magnolia (1999) Jason Robards, Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Melora Walters, Jeremy Blackman, Michael Bowen, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall, Melinda Dillon, Emmanuel Johnson. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. 188 minutes.
Rated R, 4 stars (out of five stars)
Review by Ed Johnson-Ott, NUVO Newsweekly www.nuvo-online.com Archive reviews at http://us.imdb.com/ReviewsBy?Edward+Johnson-Ott
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After an epic like "Boogie Nights," you might expect a young writer/director like Paul Thomas Anderson to follow it up with something short and breezy. Instead, the 28-year-old has crafted a wildly ambitious mosaic featuring multiple storylines, roughly 30 speaking roles and a meteorological event of biblical proportions. "Magnolia" is a sprawling look at 24 hours in the lives of a group of Southern Californians. Overstuffed and overwhelming, the production is at times frustrating, but just as often exhilarating, with several tour de force performances from its superb cast. The ultimate compliment I can pay "Magnolia" is this: even though the film is slightly over three hours long, I can hardly wait to see it again.
After a stylish prologue emphasizing that "strange things happen all the time," Anderson plunges into his fractured tale of alienation and spiritual malaise in the San Fernando Valley, introducing a vast array of characters. Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) is a desperately ill man reflecting on his failures as a husband and father. His current wife, Linda (Julianne Moore), can't deal with his impending death. Luckily, Earl has a nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is utterly devoted to caring for his needs.
Earl's estranged son Frank (Tom Cruise) is a ferocious motivational speaker, mesmerizing lost, angry men with his "Seduce and Destroy" seminars. He augments his "Respect the Cock" philosophy with instructional segments like "How to fake that you are a caring person." Essentially, Frank is the guy who would teach Sex-Ed to members of the "Fight Club."
The emotional and moral center of the movie is Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), a sweet, compassionate police officer who places the importance of "doing good and helping others" above all else. Jim meets Claudia (Melora Waters), an overstrung druggie determined to remain alone in her despair. She touches something in Jim, who builds the courage to ask her on a date.
Jim also has a memorable encounter with Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), who was once a famous whiz kid on a '60s game show. Now, Donnie works a dull job and spends his off-hours looking for love.
Getting dizzy yet? Wait, there's more. Donnie's contemporary counterpart is young Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), a boy genius enjoying a hot streak on a current game show. His tyrannical father lives, both vicariously and financially, off his son and drives the kid mercilessly. Incidentally, the host of the show is Claudia's father, Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), who has considerable emotional baggage of his own.
If this laundry list of characters and situations looks daunting on paper, rest assured that it is somehow more coherent on film. Although Anderson's flamboyant camera ricochets wildly throughout his tattered ensemble, the movie flows like some cracked symphony. Aimee Mann provides the music and her tunes unify the desolate emotional landscape. In one brilliant sequence, a character begins singing along to Mann's song, "Save Me." One by one, other cast members, living and dead, also begin singing from their various locations. The bizarre chorus is at one strangely beautiful and achingly sad; even in unison, these people are so very, very isolated.
Admittedly, there is too much going on in "Magnolia" and Anderson periodically loses his footing. The father-son exchanges at the contemporary game show are overly obvious and the director allows Jason Robards to ham it up excessively during his latter scenes. But the rest of the film more than makes up for its deficits. There are scenes of stunning impact here, and the superb cast makes the expansive screenplay shine.
Two performances in particular stand out. Tom Cruise positively crackles as the perversely charismatic selfish-help guru. His explosive work here almost seems like a catharsis for the restraint demanded of him in "Eyes Wide Shut." In fact, one of his best moments is an improvisational bit that occurs during an interview scene. At Anderson's urging, Cruise abruptly stripped to his shorts before delivering a sputtering erotic diatribe that is as frightening as it is impressive.
But John C. Reilly is the heart of "Magnolia" [NOTE: An interview with Reilly follows this review]. The superb character actor gets a chance to be a romantic lead and carries off his part with subtlety and charm. Reilly's idealistic officer could easily have turned mawkish, but he keeps the man genuine, even during his lofty idealistic speeches. Officer Jim is compassion personified, and he single-handedly rescues the story from terminal melancholy.
Something else happens in "Magnolia," something extraordinary, but I won't tell you about it. Suffice to say it is audacious, wondrous and totally successful. While the same cannot be said about "Magnolia" as a whole, I'll happily take a flawed masterpiece like this over the more pedestrian offerings of other directors any day. "Magnolia" makes important statements about family, self-absorption and the dangerous direction our increasingly fragmented culture is taking, and Paul Thomas Anderson delivers his messages with grand imagination and daring.
© 2000 Ed Johnson-Ott
John C. Reilly: The Heart of Magnolia
By Ed Johnson-Ott, NUVO Newsweekly
You may not recognize John C. Reilly's name, but you'll never forget his face. Reilly has a great mug, with the kind of distinctive features that make him a natural for a wide variety of character roles. But in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," Reilly is not only the film's romantic lead, but its moral center as well. The 34-year-old actor didn't realize his lofty place in the story until after the fact. "I think it's a credit to Paul that he didn't let that be a distraction to what we were doing," he explained during a recent phone interview. "He just let me focus on what this guy was going through on this particular day. So, the heart of the movie, the moral center of the movie, all that stuff, I learned in retrospect."
Reilly and Anderson first hooked up at the Sundance New Filmmakers Workshop, where upcoming filmmakers are given the chance to cast professional actors for video projects. Professional editors, acting as mentors, work with the resultant footage. Two years before shooting his first feature, "Hard Eight," Anderson attended the workshop and Reilly was his first choice from the talent pool. "I'd done a dozen or so movies at that time," said Reilly, "and he knew all of them. He was already a student of my work, so I met him and we've been really good friends since then. We immediately clicked; we were on the same wavelength. He just appreciates what I do as an actor."
A product of a rough neighborhood on Chicago's Southwest side, Reilly began performing in local theater as a child. "I was eight or nine years old and kind of hanging out with this shoplifting crowd at the time. It was kind of a rough Irish-Lithuanian working-class kind of neighborhood and there was this park with a field house where they had wood class and tap dance class and drama class. This friend of mine from grammar school said one day 'Hey, I'm going to the park to go to drama class, want to come with?' I didn't even know what drama meant, but I just loved the playfulness of it."
When I asked if the "shoplifting crowd" taunted him over going into theater, Reilly replied, "Not when I was a kid. They thought I was funny, so they enjoyed that I did that. They were just kind of amused by it. Now, in high school there was a little bit of stigma. 'Oh, there's the play people,' you know? But by that point I'd been doing it for ten years, so I didn't really care what people thought. I went to a boy's Catholic high school in Chicago and I would go to the girl's Catholic high school to do plays." With a chuckle, he added, "So I'd be doing like two or three plays at a time and I thought I was just the luckiest guy in the world, to be surrounded by all of these Catholic school girls, doing 'The Pajama Game' and stuff like that."
Reilly's affinity for acting turned into a way of life. He was accepted at the prestigious Goodman School of Drama and went on to perform in "The Grapes of Wrath" on Broadway. His film career began as a Vietnam War recruit in Brian De Palma's "Casualties of War." Reilly has since appeared in 21 other films, including all three of Anderson's works. He enjoys being a part of the director's acting ensemble. "Paul is incredibly loyal, he finds the people he likes and your relationship just gets deeper the more you work with him. Also, he doesn't have a lot of patience for explaining his vision to people. So if he works with the same people over and over again, you develop a kind of shorthand. Like he and I, at this point, it's almost like we communicate on the set with a series of grunts and hand signals. It saves a lot of time."
Of his three films with Paul Thomas Anderson, Reilly holds a special place for "Hard Eight." "I've got a soft spot in my heart for the first one," he said. "Just because of the simpleness, and how quiet that movie is. I think 'Boogie Nights' is certainly the most fun and I have such fond memories of it, that crazy summer when we shot it. And 'Magnolia,' to tell you the truth, as much as I love the movie and am so moved by it… I've seen it three times and the last time I watched it, it just broke my heart too much. It was like 'Oh, I need to take a little time off before I see this one again.' It's just so heartbreaking, a lot of it."
The extended family created by Anderson is now a mainstay in Reilly's life. Starting next month, he begins a five-month run with his "Boogie Nights" buddy Philip Seymour Hoffman on Broadway in "True West." "It's a major revival of the play," Reilly said enthusiastically, "I actually was the first guy in on this one. I met the director and was really impressed. He has a strong point of view on how to present the play and so, even though it's a challenging part and a lot of work, I was ready. They wanted me to do it and said 'Who do you think could play your brother' and the first name out of my mouth was Philip Seymour Hoffman." Reilly convinced Hoffman to meet with the director, everything clicked, and rehearsals start January 10th.
The idea of repeating the same lines for five months sounds daunting, to say the least, but Reilly is excited at the prospect. "It recharges you. It makes you a better actor. It's kind of like the Olympics for an actor. The audiences are always different. Just when you think you can predict what an audience will do, they surprise you.
"It's also very freeing," he continued. "After doing a lot of movies you end up feeling kind of like an employee, although that's certainly not the case with Paul, because Paul is very special in the way he lets us go off and interpret things. But with a lot of directors you're in service of some greater thing. Theater is different. You go through a sort of organic process in rehearsal and make some collective decisions about how things are going to go. Then you're turned loose on stage for two hours and it's really exhilarating. I love to play with an audience and, from the time I was eight until the time I was 22, all I did was plays, so this feels like returning to what I'm best at."
This summer, Reilly costars with George Clooney and another ensemble friend, "Boogie Nights" star Mark Wahlberg, in the highly anticipated film, "The Perfect Storm," about the fishermen of the Andrea Gail and their tragic encounter with the largest storm to hit the North Atlantic this century. "We tried to be as sensitive as we could be to the memory of them," he explained. "We just tried to portray the fishermen in a truthful way. That will be the best testament to what their lives were about. These guys all really loved their way of life." Reilly acknowledged that the movie takes a few dramatic liberties in terms of drama and interpretations of the characters. "In some ways it's a combination of a bunch of different stories of fishermen from the area. All the things that happen in the movie really happened, they just all didn't happen on this one trip." A fishing boat captain who worked on the Andrea Gail for many years was present on the set everyday. "He kept us tuned in t! ! ! o the reality," Reilly said quietly.
Being able to work with Mark Wahlberg again was a real treat for the actor. "I love Mark. He just gets better and better. He's a natural. We became friends on 'Boogie Nights,' we really hit it off. Mark also comes from a less than glamorous background; he came from some pretty tough streets himself." Like many, Reilly is amazed at how quickly Wahlberg made the transition from pop culture icon to serious actor. "He has a natural ability to find the truth. He came into 'Boogie Nights' and I didn't know who the hell he was… I knew about all the pop culture stuff that you mentioned, but I didn't know if the guy could pull it off acting wise, so I was a little bit skeptical when we started. But he was right in there, I couldn't believe it! Because I go crazy when I'm improvising and stuff, and it can be a challenge if you're not ready or not willing to jump in there as well, and Mark just jumped right in. He was so right there. We had a blast on that movie. I'm just so proud of Mar! ! ! k. He's really good in 'The Perfect Storm' too. He's from the area, around Boston, so can really relate to the whole way of life."
As for John C. Reilly's next collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson, all the actor knows is that it's coming soon. "He gives these little scheduling hints. He said, 'You're doing this play with Phil, huh? When does it end?' I said 'End of May or June' and he said 'Perfect!' That's the only clue I've gotten so far."
© 2000 Ed Johnson-Ott
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