Magnolia Review
by James Sanford (jamessanford AT earthlink DOT net)December 20th, 1999
"We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." That line turns up again and again in "Magnolia," director Paul Thomas Anderson's dizzying swing through the lives of an assortment of L.A. residents, all of whom are troubled, mostly by unresolved relationships or feelings they've tried to avoid. Rife with unexpected outbursts, moments of catharsis and deeply funny observations about love and sex, this is a film that runs you through the emotional wringer, then shifts into reverse and pulls you back through again.
Running a generous three hours-plus, "Magnolia" allows Anderson to give his cast room to explore all the corners of their characters. Almost every one of the central figures gets a soul-revealing monologue, making this a prime example of an actor's movie, and, for that matter, a writer's movie as well.
It is not, however, a picture the average moviegoer is likely to eat up. "Magnolia" shares with Anderson's previous film "Boogie Nights" a fascination with detail and nuance, with taking scenes to their limits and then daring to stretch them a little further to find some extra scrap of emotion or a surprising twist. In one of the most powerful sequences in "Boogie Nights," Heather Graham and Burt Reynolds, as porno star Rollergirl and her director respectively, troll Los Angeles in a limo looking for a guy who'll agree to be videotaped while having sex with Rollergirl. The man they choose turns out to be a former classmate of Rollergirl, which shakes her up, although she tries to maintain a cool facade since she doesn't want the camera to see her get flustered. Even after the episode's abrupt ending, Anderson lingered on Graham's face, letting her eyes and lips spell out the battle going on inside her mind between her passionless professionalism and the life she left behind years ago.
There are many moments like this in "Magnolia," particularly for "Boogie" veterans William H. Macy and Julianne Moore and for a shockingly cast-against-type Tom Cruise. It's Cruise's performance that's likely to get the most attention, since he's by far the raunchiest and most unsettling presence in the film, a self-adoring macho guru named Frank Mackey who pitches his anti-feminist "Seduce and Destroy" workshops in a series of TV infomercials. Promising his followers he can teach how to "make that lady 'friend' your sex-starved slave," Frank is like a foul-mouthed high school jock blown up to gargantuan proportions.
Macy's character is Donnie Smith, a former child prodigy who never recovered from his early dose of celebrity and today works as a salesman in an appliance store when he's not humiliating himself at the neighborhood tavern, telling disinterested barflies "I used to be smart, but now I'm just stupid." A blow-up of the $100,000 check he won on the "What Do Kids Know?" game show hangs on his living room wall, a constant reminder of how far he's fallen. He's also miserably lonely, confiding to strangers "I really do have love to give, I just don't know where to put it."
Moore's Linda Partridge, on the other hand, went out of her way to sidestep love by marrying solely for money. Now, as her husband Earl (Jason Robards) slowly dies at home, Linda is completely consumed with self-hatred and erupts at everyone she comes into contact with, from the family lawyer to an obnoxious pharmacist who makes cracks about her Prozac prescription.
No one would want to identify with any of these people, and the actors don't try to make them likable. Quite the contrary: Moore, Macy and Cruise seem determined to show us just how unattractive and pathetic Frank, Linda and Donnie really are by showing all their defense mechanisms, their explosions of anger and their inability to understand themselves.
"Magnolia" also zooms in on some folks who are suffering in silence, such as Officer Jim (John C. Reilly), a divorced cop and devout Catholic who's so eager for companionship he tries to pick up Claudia (Melora Walters), an obvious cokehead he investigates for disturbing the peace. The timid, bookwormish Stanley (Jeremy Blackman) is the current champion on "What Do Kids Know?" and, to judge from appearances, a likely candidate to follow in Donnie's footsteps. Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Earl's nurse, channels his energy into a frantic last-minute search for Earl's long-estranged son and quietly endures disapproving Linda's abuse.
The thoughts these people can't bring themselves to speak come through in the searing songs of Aimee Mann, which string together the movie's various parallel plots. "Come on and save me," Mann pleads in her delicate, bruised voice, "from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they could never love anyone." This is not a film in which the soundtrack was slapped on at the last minute. In one of "Magnolia"'s most stirring scenes, each of the major characters is glimpsed singing along to Mann's ballad "Wise Up" shortly before Anderson unleashes a climax so startling and utterly bizarre it should cement his reputation as one of the most audacious filmmakers around. James Sanford
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