Posted: 01/25/2000

Magnolia

(1999)

by Doug White

Director P.T. Anderson returns with another compassionately satirical extravaganza. Fair warning: if you found Boogie Nights overblown, hold on to your hat with both hands.

Gleefully contrived, Magnolia boldly sweeps the lives of eleven main characters into a pop opera that resonates with fateful confrontations and biting poetic justice. Though compassionate, the film also takes no prisoners, slowly bringing the characters to a brink where they either break down or break through. Never mind what he tells you, the narrator of Magnolia is not very humble.

In an opening sequence of dizzying verve, all eleven characters are quickly introduced through their connection to television. Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) pitches his seduction workshops, promising to teach humiliated men how to score with a vengeance. Claudia Wilson Gator (Melora Walters) entertains a one-night stand while watching her estranged father’s quiz show, “What Do Kids Know?” Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) luridly fucks a paramour as all three Gators frozenly smile from a family photo nearby. Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) dazzles the audience of “What Do Kids Know?” with barrage of correct answers. Off-camera, his frustrated, weary father (Michael Bowen) treats Stanley like a nuisance, hustling him to and from the studio in between acting auditions. ‘Quiz Kid’ Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), meanwhile, taunted by lingering fame, copes with middle-age desolation by preparing to undergo obviously unneeded oral surgery. ‘Big’ Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) lies in bed with terminal cancer, giving displaced fatherly attention to his around-the-clock nurse, Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Trophy wife Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore) frantically plans a day of errands. Lonely LAPD Officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly) rehearses a rap for his personal ad and earnestly speaks to us on the job as if he were in an endless episode of Cops.

Settling down for awhile, Magnolia explores the relationships hinted at in the opening, steadily undermining each character’s reliance on business as usual. Late in the film, when most of the characters are alone and desperate, we see each sing a verse from “Wise Up,” Aimee Mann’s song of enlightened acceptance. In this beautifully inspired sequence, the only one in which all characters sing, Magnolia gives voice to an unusual awareness, reversing private despair into collective hope. Stylistic daring serves dramatic purpose so movingly here that the film earns tolerance for some of its other distractions and excesses.

When we first see Earl Partridge, for example, his tortured, carping face quickly dissolves in a cartoon animation that depicts the cancer inside him. At first just an oddly amusing gimmick, the device later carries karmic sting when we learn “What Do Kids Know?” is a Big Earl Partridge Production. In retrospect, the cancer cartoon wittily sums up Earl’s end on Earth in a rhetoric that befits a mogul of schlock TV.

Most impressively, though, no matter how the narrator tweaks the characters, Magnolia refuses to sell them short. Even though—as is appropriate to operatic drama—each character at first seems a bit exaggerated, the film pays respect to all, persistently uncovering sincere emotion. Take Earl’s wife Linda, for example. Wonderfully played by Julianne Moore, Linda Partridge is a strange pantomime of hysterical grief, tying up lose ends on the day on which she plans to commit suicide. Often at a loss for words, Linda amusingly repeats what others say as if she had thought of it herself. When she finally loses it at the pharmacy, her rebuke (“Suck my dick!”), though funny, also conveys deep grief by echoing an expression that Earl favors. Linda’s devastating new love for Earl, whom she married years ago for his money, is powerfully conveyed when she arrives home. From inside the garage, we see the door open. Linda’s car enters and the door closes as if sealing a tomb. With her window down, Linda waits as monoxide fumes slowly rise around her. Suddenly remembering Earl’s liquid morphine, she interrupts her suicide so that she can help him die more comfortably. At once satirical and tragic, inducing a remarkable attitude of detached sympathy, moments like these abound in Magnolia.

The director and actors deserve special recognition for managing this high-wire act of contradictory tones; all performances are extremely good. Also, borrowing much from Steve Reich, John Brion’s score strongly supports the drama as it shift registers.

If Magnolia has a hero, it is Stanley Spector, who is so successful as a contestant on “What Do Kids Know?” that his two bratty and ungrateful teammates—where’s Willy Wonka when you really need him?—have started careers just by being associated with him. Stanley casually answers one absurdly difficult question after another until the adults in his life push their exploitation of him a little too far, denying his simple need to pee during a commercial break. When Stanley refuses to answer anymore questions, and begins asking a few of his own, “What Do Kids Know?” is transformed into an indictment of TV culture at large.

Implicitly triggering the film’s apocalyptic finale, Stanley’s defiant stand seems to break television like a spell, liberating some of the other characters, Claudia Gator in particular. During most of the film, implicitly wrecked by sexual abuse, Claudia seems bewitched by her father’s influence, obsessively watching him on “What Do Kids Know?” like a fish in a bowl. However, after Stanley brings the show to a halt by speaking the truth (“I know that I have to go to the bathroom”), Claudia is able to see her own reflection—instead of Jimmy’s—in her TV’s newly darkened glass.

When Magnolia’s heavy rain comes down (almost like cats and dogs), the characters seem to be on the verge of getting what they wish or deserve. Openly magical at this point, the film leaves its characters with an opportunity to reconcile, resume, or begin again.

Impossible to encapsulate, and not merely because of its length (179 minutes), Magnolia forcefully stays in mind. Granting the film the fullest poetic license, however, there is still no doubt that it would be better if certain tangents either were developed or simply removed along with the film’s redundancies. That Magnolia triumphantly succeeds in any case indicates how good it is.

Doug White is a writer and filmmaker who lives in southern California.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com