Magnolia
****
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Warner Village (Birkenhead Conway Park)
Released in the UK by Entertainment Film Distributors on 24 March, 2000;
certificate 18; 179 minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio
2.35:1
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; produced
by Paul Thomas Anderson, Joanne Sellar.
Written by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Photographed by Robert Elswit; edited by Dylan
Tichenor.
CAST.....
Jason Robards..... Earl Partridge
Julianne Moore..... Linda Partridge
Tom Cruise..... Frank Mackey
Philip Seymour Hoffman..... Phil Parma
John C. Reilly..... Officer Kurring
Melora Walters..... Claudia Gator
Jeremy Blackman..... Stanley Spector
Michael Bowen..... Rick Spector
William H. Macy..... Donnie Smith
Philip Baker Hall..... Jimmy Gator
Melinda Dillon..... Rose Gator
April Grace..... Reporter
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may
not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add
some extra, just for you."
--Philip Larkin, "This be the Verse"
"If you refuse to let them go, behold, I will
plague all your country."
--Exodus, Chapter 8 Verse 2
Both these quotes have meaning in relation to
"Magnolia", a film of bold dramatic strokes from which the
sins of fathers, sons and lovers come pouring onto the audience in a torrent
of stifling intensity. In most scenes it is raining. By the end of the movie,
this water will stop, to make way for a biblical plague.
Because the film is a tapestry of pathetic Los
Angeles lives, epic in length and emotion, we could compare it to Robert
Altman's "Short Cuts" (1993). But the work, by "Boogie Nights" creator Paul
Thomas Anderson, is not that distant or darkly comic; it's a penetrating
tragedy comprised of painful, sweaty close-ups. Jason Robards and Philip
Baker Hall both play influential showbiz players at different stages in terminal
cancer, who want to repent for being lousy husbands and parents. Robards's
son is Frank TJ Mackey (Tom Cruise), a self-help guru who feigns confidence
to give dangerous single men lectures on how to be effective misogynists.
Hall's daughter, played by Melora Walters, is less skilled at masking her
emotional scars. She uses cocaine and self-destructive sex to punctuate a
life of screaming and weeping.
Robards produces and Hall presents a television
game show entitled "What Do Kids Know?" One former star contestant, Donnie
Smith (William H. Macy), has grown up into a dangerously insecure loser after
being mistreated by his parents. A current one, Stanley Spector (Jeremy
Blackman), looks like a candidate for the same path.
Around these characters are good people who understand
the pain and want to help. John C. Reilly's widower cop will love and listen
to Walters and Macy. Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Robards's nurse, may not
succeed in reconciling the old man with anyone, but he can pray for and forgive
him. Julianne Moore is like a one-woman Greek chorus representing everyone
else in the cast; her character's role in the story is inconsequential, and
her job is to bookend the scenes of others with tense looks, strained eyes
and frantic breath. Like the film's constantly climactic music, she appears
to be waiting for everything to come to a devastating halt.
Somehow hope and redemption shine through the
film's closing moments, but even without it, "Magnolia" is compelling, not
depressing, because Anderson moulds the material into a dreamlike flow. His
camera spins and jolts with the freedom of the imagination, and transitions
between situations are connected by audio-visual motifs. In one shot a pack
of Camels sits on a bedside table. Cut to a pharmacy whose shelves are filled
by nicotine replacement therapies. Bizet's "Carmen" is mentioned among one
set of characters, and when we meet up with the next, an aria from the opera
is blaring on the sound track.
Many contemporary films deal with loneliness,
bitterness and despair -- "Short Cuts", "American Beauty" and "Happiness"
are among the most acclaimed. "Magnolia" is better than all of them because
its confidence and passion is so much louder. At times, it creates emotions
so extreme it's like our hair is being pulled. But I don't go to the movies
to feel unmoved.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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