So thanks again to Max for allowing me to extend my break. I forgot to take my day off Friday, so I figured why not make up for it Saturday, and then Max gives us a cool music review and I get a two-day break. So now, back we are with a review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 awesome epic Magnolia, which I did watch on Saturday, so forgive me if the memories aren’t as vivid as they normally are. But then, I’m writing this part before the actual review with plans not to remove it, so maybe you won’t notice the difference.
Magnolia is incredibly dense, incredibly deep and on an incredibly wide scale. Clocking in at just over 3 hours long, this movie screams epic. It interweaves nine separate storylines, all taking place in the San Fernando Valley. PTA said he wanted to make “the epic, the all-time great San Fernando Valley movie”, and I can’t help but think that he succeeded. In fact, there’s so much to this movie that I’m going to have to resort to bullet points, and I don’t know how far that will take us:
- I just read the Wikipedia article for this, and it really gives you a sense of the depth of this movie, what with all the storylines and the thematic elements and such.
- John C. Reilly is a chameleon. He can be as silly or as serious as he wants, he can be in fucking Step Brothers or he can be in an incredible string of Oscar bait movies like Boogie Nights (also PTA), Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, and The Aviator. I just want him to come back to serious roles again, so he can be remembered for not just being Will Ferrell’s sidekick. Then again, an Oscar nominee who makes viral comedy videos is amazing. Oh, well. By the way, he’s incredible here as police officer Jim Kurring. That was my original point. He seems to be one of three purely good souls that are main characters here. The other two are about to follow, but I just want to say that if you want to remake any movie that had Karl Malden in it, please please please cast John C. Reilly. They seem like they’d be perfect for each other’s roles.
- The second good guy is Philip Seymour Hoffman as Phil Parma, and word has finally gotten out that this could be the best actor in Hollywood. He hadn’t yet come into his own here, and I personally liked his work from Boogie Nights better, but he does the “I know how serious this moment is” cry very well, and a lot.
- The final good guy is child actor Jeremy Blackman as quizboy Stanley Spector. He’s solidly in Haley Joel Osment territory here, with big eyes that are very serious and a way of carrying himself that gives away how intelligent he is, or his character at least. His character is possibly the most interesting.
- I really wish Tom Cruise wasn’t a fucking douchebag Scientologist. The douchebag part is more important, because everyone still loved Isaac Hayes, even after he quit South Park over his beliefs. RIP Chef. I wish Tom Cruise wasn’t a douchebag because he’s a great actor, really really creepy and awesome here as Frank T.J. Mackey, a guy who teaches other guys how to, you guessed it (actually, I really hope you didn’t guess it), turn women into their sexual playthings. He gets a great reveal.
- I get to talk about Jason Robards again! He’s so amazing here as “Big” Earl Partridge, probably my second favorite performance, and he gives vitality to a character on his deathbed throughout the whole movie, while adding the authenticity to that very deathbed. He’s one of those actors that’s always himself as the role, like George Clooney or Cary Grant, but he makes it work better than anyone I’ve seen.
- My favorite performance goes to William H. Macy as former quizboy Donnie Smith, a man who was warped by the childhood that Stanley Spector is on his way to having – his dad took all his prize money, and as he says, “I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it.” He’s so great and twitchy, I just love his character even though he has such little inherent pathos.
- 728 words and only talking about the actors so far. Jeez. Okay, so the writing is so good it’s beyond comprehension. The way that unrelated stories come together without you even realizing it – I mean, it’s not your classic come-together story in that all the stories converge on one point, it’s that every story influences another story in the movie, whether at the beginning, middle or end, and these connections are what the preamble of the movie talk about, how interlocking circumstance is really what makes the world go round, and if enough circumstances come together, real shit goes down. And it goes down. In addition, the dialogue has that great combination of being real and being cinematic and dramatic that now seems to be PTA’s trademark.
- Let me backtrack for a second. Paul Thomas Anderson is an incredible young filmmaker. His three biggies have been, in succession, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood. All of them are long, deeply interesting, engaging films that make you think, and hard. He is on my shortlist of filmmakers to watch as I grow older.
- He was the writer-director on all three of those films, and his directing here is also incredible, if a little Kubrickian in its mercilessness. Its long closeups on the pained expressions of Cruise, Robards, Philip Baker Hall as game show host Jimmy Gator (also great here), and others are probably the trademark of this film.
- Thematically, apart from the chance encounters thing that I talked about earlier, a lot of this is how familial relationships shape our interactions with the rest of the world, with Robards influencing Cruise, Stanley’s dad fucking him up, and others. It’s a really tough theme, but PTA handles it well.
- PTA’s director of photography for all of his movies, Robert Elswit, was great if not “oh my god look at that camerawork” great here. Elswit did win the Oscar for TWBB, though I thought that Roger Deakins deserved it for the second best movie of last year, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Still, Elswit rules – he also did work for Michael Clayton, and surprisingly, Good Night and Good Luck, and anyone who’s seen that movie can tell you how much he did for that movie.
SPOILERS
- If this film is remembered for one thing, it will be the frogs. Oh my god, the frogs. Why they fell from the sky, no one tells you when you’re watching the movie, except for Stanley when he says, “This happens” at his moment of childhood serenity that happens for most kids at the end of movies of depth (see the two good M. Night movies, Star Wars Ep. I, literally any teen movie that has a protagonist). See the wikipedia article for its significance, I’m still not entirely sure about it, but what I do know is that it’s done so artfully and epically that I don’t need to know what it means. It seems like it fit at the time when a beloved TV icon was about to kill himself after revealing that he may have molested his daughter, when the greatest misogynist the world has ever known cries at his father’s deathbed for abandoning his mother, and when a quizboy-turned-thief has a change of heart for the wrong reasons.
- I didn’t know that kids say remarkably profound monologues when they pee their pants. I want to see if that happens a lot.
- The whole issue with Donnie Smith and the braces made me want to cry in the best way, because it’s such pure heartache and unadulterated, adolescent love in the craziest way that I have no idea how else to react.
Okay, nearly 1400 words is enough. Hope you got through it all and don’t hate me for it. I know you won’t, Kriti, I’m talking to everyone else.
I Ate My DVD Collection 