Magnolia (**** our of ****)
Starring John C. Reilly, Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise, Jason Robards Directed by P.T. Anderson New Line Cinema, Rated R, 1999 Running Time: 2 Hours 59 Minutes
by Sean Molloy
[LIGHT SPOILERS - Nothing here you shouldn't read]
When I become a significant enough celebrity to be interviewed (not too long now...), inevitably I will be asked how I wound up where I am. And when that happens, I'll sit back in my flower-encircled chair... contemplate the ceiling for a moment... and say, "Oh, let's seeeee..." sigh... "Well, gee, I'd say it's gotta be my strong family ties, all the common goals and interests I share with my friends... my unflinching determination... my charismatic smile and humble modesty... and a sense that, darn it, I know who I am and where I belong..."
Or, maybe I'll say, "Oh, let's seeeee... it's gotta be a bus ride twenty-five years ago in Washington DC, a passing compliment to a stranger about a nice hat, the mechanics of alphabetical order, and a 3 a.m. emergency room visit a couple Januarys back."
Either way. So goes Magnolia.
With his stunning third film, writer/director P.T. Anderson has composed a beautiful symphony of human interaction. This is a rich and insightful study of the invisible forces that bind us together even as they seemingly alienate us. The story darts between the lives of nearly a dozen lonely people that are all tangentially connected. Weather patterns are used as both a recurring metaphor for the fragile, forceful, seemingly chaotic connections between human lives, as well as a bit of foreshadowing for a scene that I will continue to marvel at until the day they stop making these moving picture shows.
Some may ask: "Do we really need to sit through a three and a half hour movie to find out that we don't have complete control of our lives? I could have told you that when I was eight." My answer is, well, no, I suppose you don't have to - but Magnolia never pretends it's letting us in on something we don't already know.
P. T. Anderson proves here what he hinted at with Boogie Nights - he is a gifted and talented filmmaker. I once read a book which argued that entering the mind of another person would be like landing on an alien shore - strangely familiar, mostly incomprehensible. Anderson knows this too, it seems, as every character in Magnolia has a unique history, personality, and drive.
The remarkable cast plays no small part in bringing these people to vibrant life. There isn't a single off performance here, although in this crew of standouts, Tom Cruise somehow manages to shine as the repulsively charismatic Frank T.J. Mackey, a wreck of a human being if ever there was one. His role requires dynamic personality changes, and Cruise handles each one precisely right, delivering a complete and complex character sketch. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whose recent work in Boogie Nights and Happiness (among a handful of others) have shown us he is well on his way to becoming one of the all-time great character actors, plays a nurse who lives vicariously through those he takes care of. William H. Macy can do no wrong in my book, and his role here as a former child game show star Donnie Smith is one of his finest, as a man with a ludicrously tragic obsession that serves as a poor placeholder for absent love. A young kid named Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) is now on the same game show that made former quiz kid Donnie Smith what he is today. As we watch the young Stanley, we feel as if we are witnessing a re-creation; then we wonder what would have become of ol' Donnie if the length of a commercial break and the size of a child's bladder had somehow managed to intervene in his life thirty years ago. John Rielly's good-hearted police officer and Melora Walters' nervous drug addict have an eerie chemistry together - as I watched I couldn't decide whether they're the perfect match for one another or exactly the opposite.
Magnolia manages to sustain as relentless and dizzying a pace as this sort of drama can for the first two hours. I was both completely engaged and exhausted by the time some welcome calm finally crept in at the beginning of the third hour... in this case, the calm before the storm. A remarkable scene, in which the majority of the characters come to the same realization at the same time - is made more powerful by one of the best uses of a soundtrack song (Aimee Mann penned the majority of the songs) in my film-going memory. Moments of eerie coincidence like this recur throughout and serve to strengthen the idea that you can never be alone in a crowd.
This is the kind of movie that reveals itself slowly; it was four days before I finally sorted everything out. Some things still leave me puzzled, including the title. I made a wild guess that Magnolias blossom slowly in the morning, but my knowledge of flower behavior is sorely lacking these days... or perhaps, as the poster would seem to indicate, each petal on a flower is independent, yet connected to the whole... or, perhaps still, it's just a cool thing to name your movie-that-dodges-conventional-naming. I sure as hell wouldn't know what to call it. There's also a strange and indecipherable (well, to me, anyway) rap delivered to Reilly's cop character by a potential prophet - either it contained every answer I was looking for in one neat little rhyme and I missed it, or it was just superfluous. I'd have to see it again to figure that one out.
There is nothing timid about Magnolia. It is daring and bold as any other film in this year of wonderful originality. (You've probably heard about the brashness of the ending, but I dare not discuss it here for fear of being drawn and quartered... though oh how it pains me to hold my tongue...) Magnolia is melodramatic and shameless. It's one of the best movies I've seen this year.
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