Magnolia ****
Rated on a 4-star scale Screening venue: Warner Village (Birkenhead Conway Park) Released in the UK by Entertainment Film Distributors on 24 March, 2000; certificate 18; 179 minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; produced by Joanne Sellar. Written by Paul Thomas Anderson. Photographed by Robert Elswit; edited by Dylan Tichenor.
CAST..... Jason Robards..... Earl Partridge Julianne Moore..... Linda Partridge Tom Cruise..... Frank Mackey Philip Seymour Hoffman..... Phil Parma John C. Reilly..... Officer Kurring Melora Walters..... Claudia Gator Jeremy Blackman..... Stanley Spector Michael Bowen..... Rick Spector William H. Macy..... Donnie Smith Philip Baker Hall..... Jimmy Gator Melinda Dillon..... Rose Gator April Grace..... Reporter
"They f--k you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you." --Philip Larkin, "This be the Verse"
"If you refuse to let them go, behold, I will plague all your country." --Exodus, Chapter 8 Verse 2
Both these quotes have meaning in relation to "Magnolia", a film of bold dramatic strokes from which the sins of fathers, sons and lovers come pouring onto the audience in a torrent of stifling intensity. In most scenes it is raining. By the end of the movie, this water will stop, to make way for a biblical plague.
Because the film is a tapestry of pathetic Los Angeles lives, epic in length and emotion, we could compare it to Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" (1993). But the work, by "Boogie Nights" creator Paul Thomas Anderson, is not that distant or darkly comic; it's a penetrating tragedy comprised of painful, sweaty close-ups. Jason Robards and Philip Baker Hall both play influential showbiz players at different stages in terminal cancer, who want to repent for being lousy husbands and parents. Robards's son is Frank TJ Mackey (Tom Cruise), a self-help guru who feigns confidence to give dangerous single men lectures on how to be effective misogynists. Hall's daughter, played by Melora Walters, is less skilled at masking her emotional scars. She uses cocaine and self-destructive sex to punctuate a life of screaming and weeping.
Robards produces and Hall presents a television game show entitled "What Do Kids Know?" One former star contestant, Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), has grown up into a dangerously insecure loser after being mistreated by his parents. A current one, Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), looks like a candidate for the same path.
Around these characters are good people who understand the pain and want to help. John C. Reilly's widower cop will love and listen to Walters and Macy. Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Robards's nurse, may not succeed in reconciling the old man with anyone, but he can pray for and forgive him. Julianne Moore is like a one-woman Greek chorus representing everyone else in the cast; her character's role in the story is inconsequential, and her job is to bookend the scenes of others with tense looks, strained eyes and frantic breath. Like the film's constantly climactic music, she appears to be waiting for everything to come to a devastating halt.
Somehow hope and redemption shine through the film's closing moments, but even without it, "Magnolia" is compelling, not depressing, because Anderson moulds the material into a dreamlike flow. His camera spins and jolts with the freedom of the imagination, and transitions between situations are connected by audio-visual motifs. In one shot a pack of Camels sits on a bedside table. Cut to a pharmacy whose shelves are filled by nicotine replacement therapies. Bizet's "Carmen" is mentioned among one set of characters, and when we meet up with the next, an aria from the opera is blaring on the sound track.
Many contemporary films deal with loneliness, bitterness and despair -- "Short Cuts", "American Beauty" and "Happiness" are among the most acclaimed. "Magnolia" is better than all of them because its confidence and passion is so much louder. At times, it creates emotions so extreme it's like our hair is being pulled. But I don't go to the movies to feel unmoved.
COPYRIGHT(c) 2000 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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