Magnolia (1999)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson                   Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson
Film Score: Jon Brion                                   Cinematography: Robert Elswit
Starring: Julianne Moore, William H. Macey, John C. Reilly and Tom Cruise

This is the kind of movie that makes me despair. Critics love it, though I don’t know why, because it smacks to me of the same kind of pretentious, self-indulgence that you find in modern literature these days. Mercifully, Magnolia was snubbed at the Oscars that year. The thing is, when you come right down to it, the substance of this film is no different than the vacuous plots and characters that you find in the big-budget action movies. The only difference is, instead of fists and blood, we have anger issues and profanity. Who wants to watch that? I sure don’t. And if I ever do, I can watch Jerry Springer for free.

What Anderson is attempting to do, I suspect, is to illuminate what it means to be a man and a woman and a child in our modern society, what it means to be human. But he undercuts his meaning with a prologue that emphasizes some connection between the disparate stories, when that doesn’t really seem to be the point. By far the biggest problem, however, is that he drowns the entire production in faux sentiment. Just because people cry, doesn’t mean you’re seeing real emotion. Just because they’re screaming the f-word with every other breath, doesn’t mean they’re being profound. In fact, the emphasis on profanity to punctuate every heightened emotion only does the opposite and dumbs the whole thing down. And add to that the “drama” of death. Josef Stalin said that when one person dies, it’s a tragedy, but when a million people die, it’s a statistic. Well, Magnolia is a statistic.

None of the actors really looks comfortable (i.e. real) probably because there’s no plot, just a spewing forth of raw emotion. Each has a character, but no real purpose within the film except to eventually cross paths. I could tell you who they all are, but that’s all there is to them and so there wouldn’t be much point in watching the film. By far the worse choice of casting is Julianne Moore, who has about as much emotional expression as a trick-or-treater wearing a rubber mask. She cries, but she doesn’t shed a tear. She twists her mouth into agony, but then it flops back immediately to boredom. I half expect to see her reading her lines off cue cards at any moment. It’s that bad. And that’s saying something, considering how bad Tom Cruise is. It’s like watching a really bad acting class with an equally bad director shouting at the actors to, “Emote! Emote!”

Jon Brion’s score, as well as the rest of the soundtrack, is engineered louder than the dialogue, which I guess is supposed to be edgy, but just winds up being annoying. Then there’s the song that every character sings along with as the camera skips around to the various story lines. The whole exercise is simply forced and unconvincing in its entirety. About the only entertaining scene in the entire film is when it starts raining frogs (yep, that’s not a typo). The film, I’m sure, is trying to be new, different, avant garde, but in the end Magnolia winds up being a three-hour train wreck. We watch it not because we like it, but because we can’t believe how horrific it is. The only thing missing is a voice-over crying out, “Oh, the humanity!”