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Magnolia (1999)
New Line Home Video
Full IMDb listing

by ANDY IHNATKO

It's a massive, magnificent fractal curve of a movie.

You know it's beautiful with your first surface glance. And then you sense a complexity lurking underneath somewhere, and you're compelled to examine it more closely. But when you zoom in and start looking at its details, you only see more texture and more details. And yet, at each and every level you see echoes of the simple beauty that drew you in in the first place and get a sense that it penetrates far deeper than you'll ever really appreciate. Good God, what a movie.

Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" is all about the impossibility of living up to your self-image. It's about loneliness. It's about confronting the certainty of your death. It's about how you can live your entire life during a single, numb moment when you're just staring into space. It's about The Moment of Truth. It's about parents and children. It's about television. It's about miracles actually happening. It's about the endless opportunities for success and redemption. It's about love and it's about faith and it's about regret.

To quote "Bull Durham": We're dealing with a lot of s***, here.

"Magnolia" is what I call a "Shred Film." This is where you take several small-scale, unrelated stories, shred them to bits, and then edit them all together and fill up the running length of a feature film. A typical traditional movie is about is about the beginning, complication, and resolution of a relationship between two people, usually Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. A Shred Film is just about that one twenty-minute scene they have at the coffee shop, only you also learn about the mechanic who fixed Hanks' car that morning, the fight between the gay couple that owns the coffeeshop, the elderly man who lives next-door to the gay couple, and so on.

Taking all factors into consideration, the Snuff Film remains the single riskiest form of storytelling. But the Shred Film isn't far behind. How can you possibly make this sort of thing work? You've precious little time to spend on each story and just as you're building momentum, you have to switch to another one.

The big failures wind up looking like an episode of "The Love Boat," with flat, uninvolving stories that only perk up during those brief moments of novelty when stories overlap. Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" — there, I mentioned Robert Altman in a review of Magnolia; if you had "Paragraph Seven" in the pool, you're now one step closer to winning that 2001 Mercury Sable — did a fair job. It was entertaining enough, but during the drive home from the theater it started to dawn on me that I was more entertained by the novelty of the movie than the movie itself.

"Magnolia" is a success thanks to Anderson's awareness of Shred's limitations. Without the luxury of time and plot development, the stories have to be carried by characterization. This calls for both colorful, easily grasped characters and damned great performances and "Magnolia"'s are unassailable:

Jason Robards is a TV producer in the final stages of cancer. He reported to the set shortly after recovering from a nine-week coma during which he lost fifty pounds, so physically and emotionally his performance is almost uncomfortably good. Julianne Moore is his young wife, looking for the courage to cope and finding it in odd places.

Tom Cruise is sort of the Andrew Dice Clay of infomercial self-help gurus. John C. Reilly is definitely a Loner Cop, but not in that cool Clint Eastwood way.

Philip Baker Hall is the host of a long-running kids' quiz show. Jeremy Blackman is the show's current champion, while William H. Macy was a winning contestant thirty years ago. He's managed to build upon and surpass his childhood success so well that today he's a grown man whom everyone still refers to as "Quiz Kid Donnie Smith."

These and other characters follow the Shred Film path of a moderately ordinary day with random intersections. But the execution is singularly successful. I don't think there's another film I've enjoyed more than "Magnolia." I sat there with an enormous grin, totally aware that I was witnessing a compelling standalone explanation of why the humans bothered to invent film in the first place and why the artform should be spared after the alien holocaust.

But after about two and a half hours, I was also totally aware that I'd been sitting there for at least four hours. It's long: over three hours and fifteen minutes. A little voice keeps reminding me of Roger Ebert's comment about the running length of films: that good films are never long enough and bad ones are never short enough. Then another voice tells the first one that it's being a total sissy and that the running length shouldn't cause me to dismiss "Magnolia." What Ebert said is very, very true. But when a movie puts the utterly impossible on the screen — and "Magnolia" does that three or four times, as when all the characters start humming along with the song on the soundtrack, wherever they are — and you simply buy into it without a single blip, you can't deny that this picture simply Works.

Besides, it's easy to see where some cuts should have been made. The film is framed with quasi-archival news footage and a repetitive and obsessive verbal essay (narrated by magician Ricky Jay) on the subject of the nature of The Coincidence and The Miraculous. This is meant to help underscore and set us up for the various Incidents and Intersections that take place in the film.

But it's a waste of time and self-defeating besides. Ricky Jay is probably the most talented card magician of our day. He certainly wouldn't take the stage and start off by explaining "Look, folks, I'm going to do some card tricks; sometimes, I'm going to palm cards, other times I'm going to make you look at one hand while I'm doing something sneaky with the other.." et cetera. We, the audience, understand the basic concept, and even if we don't specifically know about the Svengali Drop, we can follow what's going on.

It's vaguely offensive to have all of this laboriously explained at the outset. Maybe Paul Thomas Anderson is offending the audience by suggesting that we're too slow on the uptake. Maybe he's offending the film by showing such a lack of faith in his material's ability to stand on its own.

And the foreword planted a popcorn husk between my teeth and gums that kept me partially distracted throughout the whole last half of the film. If the opening scene in a film is of someone dramatically placing a gun in a desk drawer, you just can't help but wonder when that gun is going to come into play. And the longer you're left wondering, the worse it gets.

"Magnolia" doesn't need explanation or cheap gimmicks thanks to its construction. On first viewing, it's a great storytelling experience. On second viewing, you sense that the characters aren't merely leading intersecting lives but lives that are actually parallel.

And after the third or fourth you recognize that this is chiefly because all of these characters are leading our lives, wandering across hills and valleys that are universal, differing only in what sort of time you're making as you go.

And you will see "Magnolia" over and over again, which is the highest praise you can give a film. You can see whatever you want in "Magnolia" but in the end, what you see will be pretty damned familiar.

Copyright ©2000 Andy Ihnatko. May not be redistributed without permission. Studio PR types wishing to send Andy tapes, promotional clothing, or high-end video gear in hopes of securing a positive review are advised that such efforts are futile, but they're free to try to determine how high Andy's price actually is. Mail any and all pelft to Box 279, Norwood, MA 02062. He already has a subwoofer for his home-theater but could probably use a good pair of casual slacks.

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