If one follows the career of Paul Thomas Anderson closely, one can detect some kind of directorial or stylistic influence right on the surface of whatever the film is. If 1997’s Boogie Nights, with its hard-hitting style and sprawling technique, was the writer/director’s answer to the films of Martin Scorsese, then his follow-up to that film is Anderson’s version of a Robert Altman picture. Interweaving various storylines, shared by an enormous cast of recognizable faces (even more so now than in 1999, given the number of then-rising stars who appear at the edges of the frame), Magnolia is also something of a departure from even the expectation attached to paying homage to the earlier filmmaker’s selection of ensemble-driven works. Films like Nashville and Short Cuts were about the banalities of their characters’ connections; the opening scene of this film announces it has different intentions.
A narrator, voiced by famed stage magician and sometime actor Ricky Jay, speaks of a series of strange coincidences: A citizen of Greenberry Hill in London is murdered by three men, named Green, Berry, and Hill. A blackjack dealer is picked up by a firefighter plane while scuba-diving and dies when dumped onto a forest fire, and the pilot was his most recently disappointed customer. A young man wishes to teach his feuding parents a lesson by loading a household shotgun, only to be shot while jumping to his death. Are these occurrences chance, fate, or something less explicable? There are other such stories, by the way, such as the Italian king who met his double in both appearance and general life trajectory, only for both to die in separate shooting incidents the very next day, or the brothers in Bermuda who were killed, while riding the same moped, by the same taxi driver carrying the same passenger both times.
With his sprawling narrative, Anderson seems to be arguing in favor of something that guides the actions of the characters who populate it. This isn’t really a religious tale, though, unless one reads a bit too much into the eventual appearance of frogs falling from the sky. It’s also not particularly a spiritual one, either, although hands clasp in prayerful consideration on more than one occasion throughout. It’s more a study of probability in the macrocosmic sense, in which the actions and inactions of a broken family’s dying patriarch grow like a spider-web – or perhaps fracture like a windshield crack – across the San Fernando Valley at the turn of the 21st century. Anderson’s film is a colossal thing, consisting of 188 minutes of pure momentum that never slows, even in the most contemplative of scenes, but also rarely overwhelms, because it stays with these characters for long enough stretches that we feel their anguish, guilt, shame, regret, and liberation.
Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) is dying of cancer, and his wishes must be dealt with. This, perhaps more than anything else in Magnolia, is at the center of the film’s dramatic conflict, although there is a lot of that to go around. He is a crabby old man who wants to put things right within his family now and employs his nurse Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to find his estranged son. Phil’s task is more than a bit difficult, considering that Earl’s son Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise), now a motivational speaker specializing in misogynistic pick-up artistry, has been pretending his father died for the last 20 years. Earl’s wife Linda (Julianne Moore) met him as an unapologetic gold digger, now regretting it as she fell in love with him long ago. Under the guise of picking up his medications, she also plots to change his will so that she does not receive the money she once schemed to collect.
If the film’s credited cast were not listed alphabetically, these four would likely be top-billed, as it is their story that affects all the numerous other ones. There are several degrees of separation, for instance, between the cancer-killing Earl and that which is also killing Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), although the closest connection is that Earl once produced the quiz show that Jimmy hosts. The program made a celebrity out of Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), whose life has gone down the toilet since his parents took all his prize money, and we can see similar pieces falling into place for Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), the current show champion struggling under the weight of his fame and his boorish father. Jimmy, meanwhile, seeks to reconcile with his drug-abusing daughter Claudia (Melora Walters) and duped wife Rose (Melinda Dillon) before he dies.
There are more stories here, even before they begin the process of crossing threads, such as how Claudia becomes romantically involved with kindly police officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), Frank agrees to an interview with a journalist who knows a lot more about his life than he would want anyone to know, Linda finds herself unable to deal with the pressure of allowing her husband to die, and both Donnie and Stanley separately come to realize that the trajectory of their lives has been dictated by emotional abuse and a stunted understanding of other people. The screenplay, said to be inspired by the music of Aimee Mann (whose music provides much of the mournful soundtrack), impressively juggles every storyline and never shortchanges a single one of them for the benefit of another.
The performances match the dignity of the production and construction of the overall piece, all either pivoting upon big moments of brash, unadulterated emotion or relying on intentional understatement. In the former category, Moore plays Linda as a woman whose earlier naivete and opportunism have turned toward both fear for her loved one and panic in the wake of his imminent death, while Cruise’s movie-star persona is twisted into something repellant and a crying scene that even the movie’s fans have unfairly maligned is more akin to a plea for help from a man who has put off that kind of emotional response for decades. In the other category, Hoffman downplays some of his own, big-acting impulses as the compassionate nurse, while Reilly navigates tougher emotional terrain as the only person present with selfless ambition and Macy’s hapless, grown-up quiz-kid just has heaps of bad luck dumped on him.
It all leads to a pair of climactic moments that were make-or-break in the film’s budding reputation. The first is an honest-to-goodness music video in which all the primary characters sing along to Mann’s “Wise Up,” proving the old rule that musical set pieces belong when the characters have no other choice but to sing. The second involves those frogs, but Magnolia doesn’t simply feature falling frogs. No, the amphibians drop into moments that change the characters’ lives far beyond the end credits. For some, things will be better, and for others, worse. The lesson, insofar as the movie has one, is that the same force — be it chance or fate or luck or providence – is at work, whether it’s a scuba diver dropped into a forest fire or a father looking into his estranged son’s eyes for the first time in 20 years.
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