Magnolia Review
by "Stephen Graham Jones" (stephen AT cinemuck DOT com)January 14th, 2000
Magnolia: chubby rain
Traditionally, a commercial movie, no matter how experimental it pretends to be, will nevertheless cling to at least one dramatic requirement: the introduction, early on, of a problem, a question to be answered, something to be solved. It's important to get the audience's interest piqued early on, after all, else they won't pay attention. And the rules are simple: if it's a detective movie, start moments after the crime; if it's action, blow something up in the opening frames; if it's romance, start with heartbreak; if it's horror, kill somebody mysteriously; if it's drama, say Rosebud. Give us a starting point, something by which to gauge the progression of whatever narrative arc follows, lest we won't be engaged with the thing, will pay more attention to our popcorn/coke ratio. Or, in a movie better than three hours long, like Magnolia, we'll start paying attention to bladder elasticity, especially since Magnolia doesn't give us that initial problem to be solved.
Thing is, though, it does something better, something unexpected. Instead of involving us dramatically from the get-go, it offers a little narrated preface--the ostensible 'author' speaking directly to us, documenting what he calls 'matters of chance,' which comes to a handful of those ultra-coincidental stories we see anthologized in all those Strange Stories/Amazing Facts types books (if you're familiar with the Darwin Awards, you'll recognize some of them). What the narrator's doing is trying to extract meaning from those coincidental events, trying to make sense of a jumbled set of 'accidents' that, for one beautiful moment, all came together as something much greater than themselves, make the death they all conspired in a work of art.
And now, after allowing us a few moments to swallow this, to agree with him that strange forces are at work/play behind the curtains, the 'movie' starts, and, coincidentally enough, it's all just jumbled stuff going on, about as directionless as can be. Think Slacker, or--as we do have a cast so large--Shortcuts. Lots of scene-hopping, simultaneity (contiguity), more characters than you can initially remember names for, much less relationships between. Yet, all the same, you're not only interested, you're likely watching closer than you've watched any of those movies with 'traditional' hook-openings. Why? Because of the preface, because the narrator has properly prepped us for Magnolia, has intimated not only that mixed-up stuff can all come together into something wonderful, sometimes, but that it's going to happen here. What the preface does is function as a seductive admonition to pay attention, to not dismiss each scene as it fades from the screen but to keep it in mind with all the others, to weigh them the same until you know where and how they go, to hold them in some buffer portion of your mind until they can all be applied, at once. That'll be the rush (incidentally, this kind of rush also qualifies for the strict definition of 'catharsis'--letting out all the emotions at once, only here, those emotions are fabricated within the movie, by the movie, not something you bring to the theater yourself). Magnolia quietly promises such a rush, promises that all these random goings-on will eventually gel. Which puts us into the position to attempt to anticipate when where and how they'll come together.
Before it comes, though, that cathartic rush, those are the three of the better hours in moviedom, simply because, as we've been allowing everything the same weight, the same charge, the same level of meaning, and we suspect that there is a lot of meaning here, it's just temporarily unapplied, everything thus has the full meaning of Magnolia within it, in a potential state. We don't know if Frank T.J. Mackey's (Tom Cruise) motivational seminar is the key, if Officer Curring (John C. Reilly) losing his gun is the key, if a dog eating a dying man's pills is the key, or what, so we treat all of them as equally important, until we know better. And it's refreshing to traffic in a reality like that, where everything's magic, where everything means something, it's all interconnected. To see how it all fits we just have to, as American Beauty suggests, look closer.
As close as you look, however, still, just when you think you've got it all figured out, you don't. And you couldn't have. Really. Seriously. Part of you might feel it's unfair, but then the other part of you's caught up in the thrill of it. The nearest approximation would have to be in Fisher King, when all the train-station people lock arms and start dancing, but this is better, has that same meaningful feel as the cafe-robbery in Pulp Fiction, only everything's in sequence here, and nobody's screaming and shooting etc. I would say Magnolia is the most original movie in a long time, only we're just coming off American Beauty, Being John Malkovich. Suffice it to say that, as American Beauty and Being John Malkovich do, Magnolia also raises the standard, and raises it quite a bit. It's to cinema as Sixth Sense was to horror. And, like it or not, you do take that same mode of perception it requires with you, out of the theater, if only for a while. You don't look at something for three hours and then just look away, after all. And, in Magnolia's case, you don't really even want to look away in the first place.
(c)2000 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com
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