Magnolia (New Line Platinum Series)
by Paul Thomas Anderson
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Henry Gibson, Melinda Dillon, Michael Bowen, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour HoffmanDirector: Paul Thomas Anderson
Brand: Warner Brothers
Cinematographer: Robert Elswit
Composer: Jon Brion
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Special Edition, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 2.40:1
Running Time: 188 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-08-29
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: New Line Home Video
Movie Reviews of Magnolia (New Line Platinum Series)
Movie Review: Yep, a Hard Secular Rain is Going to Fall
Summary: 3 Stars
Okay, I give the technical aspects of this film 5 stars. But 1 star for content. I like look-at-me camera work to an extent. The acting is all the way from pretty good to extraordinary. I can feel the actor's excitement at getting such actorly things to act upon (but, still, maybe a little too James Lipton "Actor's Studio"? Just maybe?). The energy to keep all the balls in the air on this film is very high. But I agree with the criticisms desiring substance over style. This is a perfect academic case of a director going straight up his anus all the way up the alimentary canal and out his mouth again and then proceeding to take another roundtripper through the digestive system. I get the redemptive elements, I get the human elements. I get the secular quasi-eschatological elements. I get it. I just don't think the substance is that good.
I think the director DOES prepare us for the frogs from the very beginning of the film. Yeah, it's a hard biblical rain that's 'a fallin' and it portends something apocalyptic. And, lo, here comes the angel of the lord in the raps of that little ghetto boy and the psalms/jeremiads being pronounced by the little boy genius on the quiz show with the angel/caduceus symbol in the background making him look so cherubic and so forth. I get that. But, from what I can understand from reading commentary from the director and others, is that he was bolting all this stuff on as he went along in the filmmaking process. Okay, that's fine. A lot of films are made in an ad hoc, improvisatory style. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Here Mr. Anderson has made a huge stew of a movie that's never uninteresting to look at it's just. . .look, if he's making a humanistic sermon about whatever he's thinking about in life I would prefer an actual religious sermon from a preacher who is trained at that kind of rhetoric.
Three more things: (1) the profanity. I know it's moralistic and nancy to say so, but using it so much just IS lazy writing. If I want to hear somebody spouting the "F" word in anger I can do that anytime in my own room for free. I'm good at writing that kind of dialogue on my own. What I want in a movie is some semblance of eloquence. It's hard to really understand Julianne Moore's (or some other's) anger because it's all F___ this and F___ that. In the pharmacy she went all ape caca over those poor pharmacists when she could have just demurred by saying to them "it's for someone i know" and then quietly leaving. I understand her going off on the lawyer she's known for years and leaving a whole mess. For me, if I'm the actor I would want more than that. I just can't dig this Big Lebowski dialogue and come up with a real deep characterization.
(2) The self-help guru's seminars. Tom Cruise's acting is great but if you've ever had real exposure to self help seminars and the actual content of those seminars it's some of the most brilliant balloon juice you've ever heard: Wayne Dyer's Power of Intention, Susie Orman or Dave Ramsey's financial shows, etc., etc. The material that Tom Cruise is working with is so turgid and painfully unaware of what really motivates a crowd. It's like listening to those old "Married With Children" episodes where Al Bundy is having a meeting with the No Ma'am group of guys, only without the truly raucous humor Al and the rest displayed.
(3) That game show has been on for 30 years? Not on any major television network I would know of. It's way too nerdy and wonky. Alex Trebek and "Jeopardy" never gets THAT rarefied. Some variant of "Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader" might last 30 years but not this. Only some rare opera buffs on the Metropolitan Opera are going to give you a riff from Carmen in the original French along with the melody. Only an eminent historian like Shelby Foote or David McCullough is going to be able to figure out who those quotes from coming from. But Luis Guzman? Are you kidding. Whatever Luis Guzman is like in real life, he mostly plays hoods and lowlifes and all of a sudden he's playing some genius polymath to go up against the young geniuses. Who's going to believe his posse. And why do the young geniuses only have the one kid to carry them? They've got two spoiled brats and this genius doormat. Come on! This resembles, maybe, an old college bowl quiz show that would show up local public television stations or public access. Maybe it is a quiz show from the magical realist land of Mr. Anderson but it sure ain't never been seen on NBC, ABC or CBS for no three decades.
I could go on. Summing it up. Exasperatingly watchable.
And keep saying to yourselves, people, "it's just a movie." It ain't kids starving in Africa.
Summary of Magnolia (New Line Platinum Series)
An intriguing and entertaining study in characters going through varying levels of crisis and introspection. This psychological drama leads you in several different directions, weaving and intersecting various subplots and characters, from a brilliant Tom Cruise, as a self-proclaimed pied-piper, to a child forced to go on a TV game show and the pressures he faces from a ruthless father.A handful of people in the San Fernando Valley are having one hell of a day. TV mogul Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) is on his deathbed; his trophy wife (Julianne Moore) is popping pills with alarming frequency. Earl's nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is trying desperately to get in touch with Earl's only son, sex guru Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), who's about to have his carefully constructed past blown by a TV reporter (April Grace). Whiz kid Stanley (Jeremy Blackman) is being goaded by his selfish dad into breaking the record for the game show What Do Kids Know? Meanwhile, Stanley's predecessor, the grown-up quiz kid Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) has lost his job and is nursing a severe case of unrequited love. And the host of What Do Kids Know?, the affable Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), like Earl, is dying of cancer, and his attempt to reconcile with his cokehead daughter (Melora Walters) fails miserably. She, meanwhile, is running hot and cold with a cop (John C. Reilly) who would love to date her, if she can sit still for long enough. And over it all, a foreboding sky threatens to pour something more than just rain.
This third feature from Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights) is a maddening, magnificent piece of filmmaking, and it's an ensemble film to rank with the best of Robert Altman--every little piece of the film means something, and it's solidly there for a reason. Deftly juggling a breathtaking ensemble of actors, Anderson crafts a tale of neglectful parents, resentful children, and love-starved souls that's amazing in scope, both thematically and emotionally. Part of the charge of Magnolia is seeing exactly how may characters Anderson can juggle, and can he keep all those balls in air (indeed he can, even if it means throwing frogs into the mix). And it's been far too long since we've seen a filmmaker whose love of making movies is so purely joyful, and this electric energy is reflected in the actors, from Cruise's revelatory performance to Reilly's quietly powerful turn as the moral center of the story. While at three hours it's definitely not suited to everyone's taste, Magnolia is a compelling, heartbreaking, ultimately hopeful mediation on the accidents of chance that make up our lives. Featuring eight wonderful songs by Aimee Mann, including "Save Me." --Mark Englehart
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