After I saw There will be Blood, I knew I had to see another Paul Thomas Anderson film. Blood was so beautiful and so rich that it seemed like Anderson had the potential to have other movies as great and effecting as that.
So my first venture into his older films was his 2000 film Magnolia, a three-hour film about the semi-intersecting lives of six people in the San Fernando Valley.
Usually, I don’t enjoy films about semi-intersecting lives. To name a few, I did not like Crash, Babel, or Amores Perros. These were films that tried desperately to get you to see that all our lives are connected. To see that our actions effect the lives of others. We get it.
But the beauty of Magnolia is that this film only uses those coincidental intersections for cohesion, not to show that our actions effect others, not to show that all our actions mean something. Instead, this movie is a character study about these people who are slowly descending into loneliness and madness. And, because of these intersections, the movie becomes a movie instead of six vignettes–instead of something along the lines of Coffee and Cigarettes. And the cohesion sinks deeper than accidents, it is a chain and a link that is evident through the characters’ pain and their personalities. Their stubbornness to reveal the past (for example, we only find out about the past of John C. Reilly’s cop character in the last third of the film), their desperation, their sadness. Each character has their own poignant scene that shows just what they are feeling. And what they are feeling is what the other five people are feeling. And maybe, just maybe, it’s what someone in the audience has felt. That’s how you make a connection–through emotion since we are all the same at the bottom of everything.
Magnolia hosts an all-star cast featuring the likes of William H. Macy, Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise, Alfred Molina, John C. Reilly (Surprisingly, only once I thought, “Dewey Cox is a cop?!”), and many others. No matter how much I hate his acting abilities, Tom Cruise’s character was one that was so well-written to the person that it is scary.
Cruise’s character is a sexual-motivational speaker under the mantra of “Respect the cock and tame the cunt.” He’s a hardass who’s showing you how to get any woman you want. His character is a heartless, soulless, bastard… For awhile. See, that’s where it starts to break down. During an interview scene, the character begins to crack and suddenly Cruise’s acting abilities come into question. He is an actor who simply cannot show sadness. Blame it on L. Ron Hubbard, whatever. He’s one who can do pensive, angry, and other emotions that one would associate with the color red. However, when he gets into the blue emotions–sadness, depression et al–Cruise begins to crack and his on-screen presence begins to pull you out of the film.
Luckily, he’s only one-sixth of this film. And one-sixth of three hours is only 30 minutes. And he’s only blue for about fifteen of them. So for the other 165 minutes, you’ve got other actors who can do blue and red swimmingly. And you’ve got a director who knows how to cull the best from most actors. You can tell that these people are genuinely sad and genuinely guilty and genuinely unfit for life.
But the problem with a film of this scope and length is that there’s only so much sadness that a person can take before the apathy and the boredom sets in. And that’s usually around the 90-minute mark. So what Anderson has done rather brilliantly, is to offset some of the sadder moments with music in the background–like a scene where William H. Macy is in a bar, drinking himself silly and bearing his soul to those who will listen. It’s an effecting scene, but one that is overlaid by what is pouring from the jukebox which is typical barroom fare. By doing so, the watcher is allowed a bit of a rest from all the Kafka-esque deprivation and the spiraling towards hell that this film deals with.
There is so much more I could write about Magnolia, but it’s so layered and so thick that to explain it would be like giving someone the bottom layer of a wedding cake without the wedding and without the rest of the cake. You have to see this film to truly appreciate its beauty and depth.
