Magnolia Review
by "Mark O'Hara" (mwohara AT hotmail DOT com)January 16th, 2000
Magnolia (1999)
A Review Essay by Mark O'Hara
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A couple of times a year a film involves me so completely that I forget to notice things. I stop looking for clever camera angles and listening for precise dialogue. Eyes on the screen, defenses down, I hang on to question, predict and savor.
In "Magnolia," Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted just such a film, one that left me puzzled and pleased. A social epic -- Anderson could have borrowed Trollope's old title, "The Way We Live Now" - the film chronicles the lives of several people, tying together their existences in terrible and heart-rending ways. Similar to any important film, there's a message here somewhere, and part of the pleasure is in figuring out how all of the pieces of social comment fit together.
The plot sprawls: a result of the ensemble cast and subplots. We follow the lives of several people through a remarkably short time - a very eventful day or so. One character, Officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), serves as a link between at least two of the subplots. As such, he helps to unify the narrative, an important role in a big story. Kurring answers a call to the apartment of an African-American woman who shouts and lies to him. And this is only the first traumatic event of his shift. Shortly later he comes up against a tiny and profound clown, an African-American boy who claims to know the perpetrator of the crime committed in the apartment; the boy tells it in a rap, though Kurring (and we) have a hard time understanding him. There's a curious motif in Anderson's story: it's sometimes hard to fathom a message even when we hear it plainly. This situation is both frustrating and endearing, as we watch on to discover answers just as we feel mildly irked at coming up short of answers. It's as if a couple of characters act as oracles in a life that is darn hard to predict.
Kurring later investigates noise in another apartment, and finds a young woman attempting to hide her cocaine sniffing. This Claudia (Melora Walter) is so hopped up that a trace of comic relief seeps in as Officer Kurring speaks with her, wangling his way into her apartment for coffee and conversation, ostensibly to keep out of the rain. Although Kurring seems oblivious to her state of high, he may also be exercising tact engendered by his compassion. He truly seems interested in helping her. Reilly is very strong in this role; his gentleness is out of place because it is so striking. The big man wears a moustache in this film, but his face is still a common and friendly one: Reilly appears to be assuming in many of his performances a position not unlike the confidant in drama. He's there to facilitate the workings of a very sophisticated plot. Walter is also powerful in the part of addict. Hair ragged and eyes runny, she goes along with the cop's questions and hopes to be rid of him soon. The rub she has to face is a challenging one - when he asks her on a date, hope begins to leak through her anguished expression.
But this is not nearly all. Jason Robards plays Earl Partridge, a former television producer dying of cancer. Confined to a hospital bed in the living room of his mansion, he interacts with a caregiver named Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Through his bouts of pain and oblivion, Partridge tells of his life and sources of grief; his confession of abandoning his family and 14 year-old son (just as his wife was dying of cancer) does not, oddly enough, put us off more than a medium distance. Robards is very convincing as this husk of a man, and Hoffman is even more compelling. His is a good soul, accommodating the wishes of those around him in much the same way as Kurring the cop accommodates the common people around him, who dip and swerve into badness.
Julianne Moore plays Linda Partridge, the young wife of the dying man. What's original about her character is that her gold-digging instincts have left her, replaced by genuine love of Partridge; she now wishes to divest herself of any money she might inherit - which will be a huge sum. Linda is the most foul-mouthed character in the piece, the words escaping her face with vicious carelessness. Moore is the premiere actress at playing the big-hearted shrew.
Meanwhile, Partridge's long-estranged son, played by Tom Cruise, is now a cultural phenomenon. He's the guru of a part of the men's movement gone haywire, the charismatic aggressor in a motivational business he calls "Seduce and Destroy." Undereducated and misosgynistic, this man has taken the name of his dead mother's father, Frank Mackey - he so wishes to distance himself from father Earl. Cruise has already been nominated for a Golden Globe as a best supporting actor - though it's hard to say which actor in the movie is not a supporting one. Cruise's performance is nothing less than electrifying: he's able to telegraph hatred and repressed loneliness with great clarity. This may be his best acting yet.
Philip Baker Hall plays Jimmy Gator, the master of ceremonies of a long-running television quiz show that pits brilliant children against adults; the show is called "What Do Kids Know?" One of Gator's problems is that he's suffering from both cancer and burnout, and he drinks even as he leaves his dressing room/office for the live show. Hall is an accomplished actor, and "Magnolia" is a good vehicle for his talents: he gets to play not only a fallen star, but a dysfunctional father (to Claudia) and husband (to Melinda Dillon's Rose Gator) as well. Finally, this subplot includes a boy genius, Stanley, played by Jeremy Blackman. This kids totes three or four backpacks brimming with books, without the help of his vain father, who alternately praises and curses Stanley from the green room. It's fascinating to find out what Jeremy will do when one of the producers won't let him use the bathroom during the live format.
Ah, another of Anderson's themes - exploitation. "Magnolia" gives us the biggest bunch of users in a long while. One question the director/writer seems to be toying with is, Why are these characters behaving like this? Well, the very posing of this question tells us that Anderson is not out to take the easy way. Instead, he probes into the backgrounds of many of his wandering souls, and we hear a sentiment William Faulkner would have liked: "We're through with the past, but the past isn't through with us." (Faulkner's version was, I think, "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past.) Frank T. J. Mackey is so disturbed at least in part because of his abandonment; Stanley acts like he does because everyone seems to view him as a super-smart freak; William H. Macy's Donnie Smith - an adult version of Stanley - is looking for "a place to put his love." All of these people have been neglected or abused in some way, their lives thrown into emotional dryness.
Perhaps the moments that will create the most buzz are the two forays into magical realism. These are Anderson's real triumphs in the film - bits of bold risk-taking that give the piece vitality and lift it into the realm of fable. It's easy to imagine, though, the conversation of viewers who will refuse to understand: "What was that all about? Did that really happen? That was stupid!" These segments represent Paul Thomas Anderson's cleverness at using the medium for what it does best, offering a visual tone poem on life. The cross-cutting among subplots is particularly well done.
Here's an objection, though. It appears that Anderson uses the two unusual happenings as thematic alarms that highlight the links that tie these people together. We can see them as students in the classroom of a creative ethics teacher, each one holding a length of yarn in a web that demonstrates what you do affects me, and vice versa. This use is not problematic in itself; however, Anderson has also crafted a thin frame that tries to hold the whole picture. The opening minutes of "Magnolia" focus on a series of bizarre coincidences - urban legends one might receive in junk e-mail, really. The filmmaker does not need these, frankly, to get us to see the interconnected nature of human lives, nor to foreshadow the canted craziness of magic.
The editing, by Dylan Tichenor, does well in moving the narrative along, gathering its threads into a skein of recognition. And the cinematography by Robert Elswit captures candid, down-to-earth angles. Especially captivating are moments when we cannot hear the actors' dialogue because of the music - here we realize how life goes on, how every second of life is both precious and mundane.
"Magnolia" has so many small pleasures. The opening credits are wonderful to watch on the broad screen: we watched in a theater with stadium seating, the screen more than twice the width of regular ones. The credits are also accompanied by lovely music, and a slightly psychedelic flavor from the late 60's, the cast to the film slightly washed out as we see a shot of a magnolia flower, for instance. I also liked Reilly's voice-over narration late in the film. Mostly I found enough to intrigue me for over three hours - no small accomplishment for a director under 30, only a few films under his belt.
This is a definite R rating, not one I would drag a child to simply because I wanted to see it. But its handling of complicated and crucial ideas is worthy of wide attention, and I expect it will be recognized at the ceremonies of several awards. There have already been comparisons between "Magnolia" and Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" from the middle 90's. In it Altman combines some of the tales of the master short storyist Ray Carver, and spins some of his own. Besides the sprawling plot and ensemble cast, it is difficult to compare the two films. I'm sure Anderson considers Altman as one of his mentors, but "Magnolia" also has the feel of originality attained by a student of film who can teach us all a good deal.
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