Magnolia (1999)
The Paul Thomas Anderson detractors that I’ve met usually present Magnolia as Exhibit A in the “the man is overrated, indulgent and overly precious” line of thinking. And I admit it freely; Magnolia is going to be a hurdle for you if you’re not into the mojo that Anderson is usually working. The film is unruly and indulgent; accentuating everything that could have brought Boogie Nights to a crashing halt at any given moment. The restrained Anderson of Hard Eight has left the building entirely for Magnolia and the midnight carnival Anderson of the Alfred Molina scene of Boogie Nights has taken over. Magnolia is Anderson’s longest picture, clocking in at just less than 190 minutes, and an editor of even the slightest seasoning could have probably found a way to shave sixty of those minutes.
There is wonderful material to be found here, and Anderson’s technique is an even more assured and bravura humanist hybrid of Altman, Scorsese, etc, etc, but there’s really nothing here that wasn’t explored in Boogie Nights. I think Anderson just had more material in this line that he wanted to get off his chest, and maybe he wanted to do it divorced of potentially alienating subject matter such as the porn industry. If I’m recalling correctly, Anderson said at the time that he was looking to break the traditional three act structure that dominates most mainstream storytelling, and that he tried to structure Magnolia like an album. Magnolia isn’t Inciting Incident-Conflict-Climax; it’s a long roundelay that climaxes three times, about once every hour. The ambition is interesting but it feels like too much, Anderson tries too hard, and things are spelled out too much. A zoom in on a painting containing the phrase “yes that happened” (or something to that effect) illustrates Anderson’s strain and self-consciousness.
The stories don’t mesh as organically and effortlessly here as they did in Nights either, and, as a result, the film feels redundant. I imagine that the redundance is at least partially intentional, Anderson’s riff on life’s cyclical nature and the ways we wrong one another in the exact same way we were wronged ourselves, particularly within our own family. Again, it feels like Anderson is justifying himself, underlining, underlining, underlining. The Tom Cruise episode is strange and moving, and the script has wisely built the actor’s ticks into the part, but the scene between Cruise and Robards toward the end is endless. The romance between John C. Reilly and Melora Walters is one of the strongest elements of the film, but Anderson burdens even that with a ridiculous street prophet scenario that was wisely shortened from the original script.
Magnolia is still a small price to pay for the kind of mammoth ambition that Anderson displays both here and in Boogie Nights. You’ll notice that I’ve given the film a three and a half star rating, despite having spent the majority of the post discussing its shortcomings. The film still has a blunt power, is still original, and still exhibits a filmmaking fever that should be encouraged and treasured. There is, for both better and worse, enough fervor and soul for ten pictures in Magnolia. Many have compared the film to Short Cuts, but I’ve always found that a bit lazy, the films are on opposite ends of the bar tonally. Altman’s film is subtle and naturalistic, Anderson’s is operatic in all senses of the word, including soap.
Making pictures of any kind, despite how much we sometimes bitch, requires courage. It takes courage to put yourself on the line and tell a story that many will see, and that faces rejection or outright embarrassment. Paul Thomas Anderson is considerably talented, but he’s also even more courageous than most. His films aren’t bashful or cloaked in irony. His films are sad and wounded, and I think it was this quality that drew me to Anderson’s films, particularly Magnolia, to begin with. I was a twenty when Magnolia was released, a sophomore in college. I saw the film four times and thought it to be one of the greatest I’d ever seen. I don’t still believe that, but I’ll always be grateful to Anderson for Magnolia, regardless of its faults.
★★★½
