Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson is the auteur’s auteur. His films are always bold, idiosyncratic, and assured in their technique and craft in ways that make other filmmakers drool with envy. Unlike the similarly named but unreleated Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas makes a radically different film every time he gets behind a camera. On their surface, his films about 1970s pornographers, a turn-of-the-century oil baron, an out-of-luck gambler, a pushover with anger issues, or the founder of a Scientology-like cult don’t have much in common. But beneath the disparate eras, characters, and story structures, most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films deal with two things: the problem of ambition and the difficulty of human connection. Anderson’s protagonists often suffer from either a profound abundance or lack of worldly ambition. Complicating that is their inability to maintain connections with other people – family members, lovers, co-workers. Anderson’s characters stumble through their lives trying to accomplish their goals, while needing other people badly and yet often being unable to articulate that need. 

Anderson won acclaim and attention for his first two films, Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, but it was 1999’s Magnolia that pushed him from being a talented, young director to being a great filmmaker of the first order.

Taking place over the span of one day in California’s San Fernando valley, Magnolia tracks no fewer than nine main characters as their stories arc, intersect, and then go their own way again.

One of the storylines follows a former television producer played by Jason Robards as he is swiftly dying of cancer. While his much younger trophy wife, played by Julianne Moore, descends into grief and drug addiction, his nurse played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, tries to reach out to the dying man’s estranged son. Tom Cruise plays the son who has renamed himself Frank “T.J.” Mackey and now teaches a brutally misogynistic “self-help” course on picking up women called “Seduce and Destroy.” 

Other storylines include a child genius appearing on the TV quiz show that Jason Robards’ character used to produce; the host of the show trying to reconnect with his daughter who is now a drug addict; the cop who falls in love with the drug addict daughter while on a routine call and who also catches a former child quiz show genius as he’s in the process of committing a crime.

The entire film is about the interconnectedness of life and also its unresolved, inexplicable nature. We see each character either directly interact with or at least brush against the lives of the others. However, despite the web of seeming coincidences and the film’s oddball, half-miraculous/half-apocalyptic climax of raining frogs, Magnolia doesn’t necessarily tie everything up with a tidy bow. There is reconciliation and atonement but not complete resolution. Frank Mackey weeps at his father’s death. The cop and the drug addict want to make their relationship work. But the movie only brings us to that point without suggesting that things are actually going to work out just fine.

Jason Robards and Tom Cruise are particular standouts. Robards’ performance as a man weaving in and out of consciousness and presence of mind is scapel sharp and as accurate a portrayal of the process of death as anything I’ve ever seen. Cruise made the bold choice of taking on a character who says and does legitimately horrible things and is completely gleeful about it. Cruise is always at his best as an actor when he takes chances and goes beyond his charming action hero standard setting. You won’t enjoy anything Frank Mackey has to say, but you will be wowed by Cruise’s skill in making him a real person.

At three hours and eight minutes, Magnolia is an investment. Its oddball moments like the entire cast singing an Aimee Mann song together or the cloudburst of frogs that brings Los Angeles to a halt may stretch your credulity, but for myself, I loved it and I’m sorry it took me all these years to finally get around to see it.