I'm sorry I don't have more room to write about Paul Thomas Anderson's
dazzling Magnolia, which cuts with remarkable ease and dexterity
among several interlocking sets of characters on a single cataclysmic day
in the San Fernando Valley. As Noel Murray notes, it's an amazing director
indeed who can fuse Martin Scorsese's speed-freak virtuosity and Robert
Altman's kaleidoscopic character studies into a whole new hybrid. Yet
Anderson's work here seems vastly superior to its main reference point,
Altman's Short Cuts--even though Anderson is the one who has taken
lumps for linking his characters through a spectacularly unhinged third-act
catastrophe.
Magnolia expands upon the already imposing crazy-quilt structure
of Anderson's Boogie Nights, a movie I underrated when it first came
out. In fact, you could describe Magnolia as Boogie Nights
times two, given its doubling of every main character and incident. The
rhyming plots--two delinquent fathers, two betrayed adult children, two
game-show victims, two desperate lovesick loners--would seem excessive, if
they didn't reinforce Anderson's expansive and deeply humane notion that no
one is truly alone, whether s/he knows it or not.
The combination of that peculiarly innocent sentiment and Anderson's
hyperbolic bustle produces effects that are doubly moving for being so
unguarded. The litmus test for the audience's patience is a lip-synching
scene set to an Aimee Mann song, to which every character voices his
unspoken despair in unison. Either you'll howl at the goofiness of the
contrivance, or you'll marvel at the director's fearless humanism. If
you've ever been dumbfounded by the fateful significance of a song on the
radio, my guess is you'll give in.
Among an enormous and enormously talented cast, John C. Reilly stands
out as a sweet-natured cop, as does Melora Walters as an anguished addict,
Julianne Moore as a guilt-stricken wife, William H. Macy as a former quiz
kid, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a tender caregiver--there are too many
others to mention. Except for Tom Cruise, who redefines his career with a
ferocious turn as a voracious cable-TV sex guru. Spouting pre-coital
sloganeering ("Respect the cock!") with Tony Robbinsian fervor, Cruise
lampoons his cocksure Top Gun persona to lacerating comic effect.
Even so, he and Anderson refuse to let us overlook the humanity in his
overblown boob--or the other aching souls caught in the story's trajectory.
Magnolia is a hothouse flower, all right, but its perfume is close
to intoxicating.
© 1995-99 DesertNet, LLC . Nashville Scene . Powered by Dispatch