Bloom's day
Magnolia blossoms a bit too much
by Peter Keough
MAGNOLIA, Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. With Jason Robards, Julianne
Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Tom Cruise, John C. Reilly,
Philip Baker Hall, Melora Walters, Jeremy Blackman, Michael Bowen, and Melinda
Dillon. A Fine Line Features release.
Last year, maverick filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson burst from
the indie fold with the surprise critical and box-office hit Boogie
Nights. Bolstered by this success and studio backing, he returns with
Magnolia, a movie even more brilliant and, at over three hours, far too
long. If an hour of weeping and other excesses had been deleted, Magnolia
could well have been the best film of the year.
As it is, it's worth watching for its sheer imaginative exuberance, unabashed
passion, and brash confidence. Let's just hope that with his next movie
Anderson takes the advice of a good script editor.
Budding genius
LOS ANGELES -- After three hours of Magnolia, one of the year's most
challenging and ambitious movies, a bizarre, intense exploration of subjects
ranging from fate and coincidence to game shows and tabloid TV, the question
everyone is most eager to ask director P.T. (formerly Paul Thomas) Anderson
was: that big kielbasa Tom Cruise sports in his shorts -- was it real?
"I learned to put a big dick in every movie," says Anderson, referring to the
prosthesis Mark Wahlberg exposes at the end of the wunderkind director's last
film, Boogie Nights, an epic of the '70s porn industry and family
values. "Is it real? Ask Nicole [Kidman, Cruise's wife]."
Clearly, Anderson is a filmmaker who values length, but he doesn't think size
matters much if you don't know how to use it. Magnolia, as he describes
it, follows a calculated, quasi-musical structure. Starting with an abrupt
statement of themes, it develops them and then resolves them in a climax and
coda.
"I had this structure all planned out. Basically this prologue would happen a
mile a minute, give you these three stories, leave you wondering, `What the
fuck was that?' And then in a very quick and elliptical, musical way we'd meet
our characters. And then actually the movie takes a slow beat to be able to
introduce those characters with a little more information. Once you've done
that, the movie kicks in. We're cross-cutting and the music starts and it just
goes and goes and goes. We are winding through the day. And that will wind and
wind and wind and wind, and ultimately you will get to the place where the rain
stops. And then the idea was to slow it down there, to be able to take a breath
on all that information that has just come at you."
Which sets you up for the film's big twist, which Anderson doesn't want to give
away. When it's suggested that the film is like a cross between Jacques Demy's
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Robert Altman's Short Cuts, he
frowns. "I haven't seen Umbrellas of Cherbourg. There are parallels to
Short Cuts -- an LA movie that has multiple characters. And I think I
love Short Cuts, but I never thought of that. What I missed from
Short Cuts is plot. It's just slice-of-life -- this happens over here,
this happens, that happens -- and they're not entirely connected. What was
interesting to me was throwing in a mystery plot. The thriller elements into
everyday drama."
And since we're throwing around the names of filmmaking geniuses, how about the
Stanley Kubrick reference of playing the opening bars of Richard
Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra as an introduction to Tom Cruise?
"Tom got this wonderful kick out of this, saying, `Stanley's going to love
this. It's going to be so funny.' The idea was that you have the biggest movie
star in the world in your movie. When he's first introduced, it's on this
shitty little television screen doing an infomercial. But then for those who
need the movie-star entrance, we're going to play 2001, and he's going
to fucking come charging down the stage and say the line that he says."
Which is the now legendary "Respect the cock! Tame the cunt!" Was that line a
factor in Cruise's taking this part after the sexual frustrations of Eyes
Wide Shut?
"I think that was a major draw for him, actually. And I made fun of him after I
saw Eyes Wide Shut. I said, no wonder you were fucking so anxious to be
in this movie. You were the repressed Dr. Bill for two years. Two fucking
years, man, you know, and you didn't get to do anything. The whole time he's
dying to get laid. The guy's just . . . he's never said 'cunt'
in a movie before."
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Not that he needs any help with the film's first 15 minutes, which are as
compressed and organic as the rest of the film is loosely wrapped and
overwrought. A tongue-in-cheek prologue in the mode of Unsolved Mysteries
presents three examples of how invented truth is stranger than fiction, a
trio of "historical" cases of coincidence and poetic injustice illustrating the
truism that fate and synchronicity often add up to more -- and less -- than
meets the eye. A cut is made to a gorgeous, computer-generated magnolia blossom
unfolding in intricate detail to the tune of Aimee Mann singing Nilsson's
"One," and that carries over to the breathless, tracking introduction of the
film's major characters and storylines, an overture so dense and fluid that if
it were sustained much longer, exhilaration would give way to exhaustion.
Mercifully, and perhaps unfortunately, the pace slows and the interbraided
story motifs are unraveled. It turns out that Anderson tends to mistake
redundancy for depth. Most films would be satisfied with just one abusive
father dying of cancer seeking reconciliation with an estranged child; this
one's got two. There's Earl Partridge (Jason Robards, chewing the scenery as
well as his oxygen mask), a TV executive on his death bed attended by his
neurotic trophy wife, Linda (a paler, weepier Julianne Moore), and by his
compassionate male nurse, Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman in a rare bland role).
Earl's last wish is to get back in touch with his estranged son, Frank (Tom
Cruise, back to the id-channeling of Born on the Fourth of July after
the repression of Eyes Wide Shut), a male-empowerment guru whose motto
is "Respect the cock! Tame the cunt!"
Sick bad dad #2 is Larry Gator (Philip Baker Hall), the crapulous host of the
kiddie quiz show What Kids Know. He's trying to get back together with
his estranged daughter, Claudia (Melora Walters in a cunning, fragile
performance), who's a junkie. Meanwhile, LAPD loser Jim Kurring (John C.
Reilly), a cop who passes the lonely cruising hours (riding shotgun with him is
a shotgun) pretending he's on Cops, has responded to a complaint at
Claudia's apartment and in between reciting platitudes to her thinks he's
fallen in love.
Then there's not one but two abused child prodigies. The older, Donnie (William
H. Macy), has traded in his '60s quiz-show fame for a job at an electronics
outlet and a desire to get braces in order to be like the bartender he has a
crush on. The younger, Stanley (Jeremy Blackman), dazzles the audience of
What Kids Know by singing lyrics from Carmen in French but still
can't get love from his father (who is not dying of cancer) or a bathroom break
from the show's draconian producers.
So what of the black woman with the dead man in her closet, or the
prophetically rapping kid who steals Kurring's gun? Intriguing loose ends, they
don't get tied up in Anderson's day-in-the-lives fugal structure, which
culminates in too many teary climaxes. One, in which Robards whines for 10
minutes, is insufferable; another, in which various members of the cast
improbably pick up, à la The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the refrain
of Aimee Mann's haunting "Wise Up," is both hilarious and touching. In general,
though, the ambitious counterpointing of eight of her songs with the narrative
doesn't quite pay off.
What does pay off is a turn in the weather that is both absurdly unexpected
and, given the odd Biblical reference spotted on marquees and elsewhere (not to
mention the film's heavy debt to Robert Altman's Short Cuts),
surprisingly apt. This device too suffers from overkill, but it's a welcome
relief. After hanging as dense and heavy as the scent of the title flower for
what seems several lifetimes, Magnolia blooms into its apocalyptic
finale not a moment too soon.
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