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"Three Kings," one "Witch" and a "Princess"
Salon Arts & Entertainment's critics pick their favorite movies of 1999.

[12/17/99]

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Magnolia Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Starring Jason Robards, Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly, Melora Walters, Philip Baker Hall, Melinda Dillon and Jeremy Blackman

"Magnolia," Paul Thomas Anderson's follow-up to "Boogie Nights," is both obvious and oblique, banal and still locked up inside his head. An attempt to outdo the hit "Boogie Nights" in both length and scope, complete with a climactic Biblical apocalyptic event, Anderson's third film is a multi-character drama that follows a group of disparate people in the San Fernando Valley over the course of 24 hours. During much of its three hours and 10 minutes, "Magnolia" leaps from thread to thread with only the most tenuous connections discernible. By the time a character remarks, sometime in the third hour, "That's a long way to go with no punchline," you're inclined to agree. Eventually the punchline comes, and you may find yourself wishing it didn't.

"You have to be nicer to me," says one character to another toward the movie's end, and that's about what "Magnolia" comes down to. By itself, that's not fatal. There are plenty of great movies that, were they reduced to their "meanings," might seem unaccountably banal. But the emotional experience of great movies, of great art, period, overwhelms mere meanings. (Want a seasonal example? Reread "A Christmas Carol.") By the close of "Magnolia," you're painfully aware of how everything in the movie is put at the service of Anderson's trite message.

Both "Boogie Nights" and "Hard Eight" (Anderson's still mostly unseen debut that is, in some ways, his best film) could be said to be about the families we choose for ourselves. "Magnolia" is about the families we're stuck with. Half the characters here are neglectful parents like Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), a TV producer dying of cancer who for years hasn't seen his son Frank (Tom Cruise) -- an Anthony Robbins-like infomercial guru selling male sexual power -- or Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), the longtime host of a kids' game show who can't talk to his own daughter, the coked-out recluse Claudia (Melora Walters). The other half are neglected children like whiz kid Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) who's the long-running champ on Jimmy Gator's show but, off-camera, an albatross to his own father, or Stanley's spiritual predecessor, Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), a former contestant on the show whose fame made his parents rich but whose adult life has been rudderless.

The characters link up either personally or thematically, and it takes awhile to sort out their relationships. There are also people who, by occupation or temperament or both, are caregivers, like Jim Curring (John C. Reilly), an almost comically decent cop who meets Claudia on a routine call and falls in love with her; or Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the hospice worker who tries to put Earl back in touch with his long-lost son. Even the marriages here carry suggestions of parent-child relationships, not just in the disparity in ages between Earl and his young wife Linda (Julianne Moore), who's coming apart as she finds she has fallen in love with her husband whom she married for money, but in the way that Jimmy's wife Rose (Melinda Dillon, back on the screen after a much too long absence), nurses him through illness with a tender solicitude. Even the minor incidents, an anecdote that opens the film and the first call we see the cop Jim Kurring respond to, have to do with the theme of parents and children.

"Magnolia" doesn't feature as many characters as "Boogie Nights" did, and its subject is on a more intimate scale than the earlier film's portrait of the porn industry's golden era. But despite fewer characters and more time to get to know them, none of the characters in "Magnolia" feel as vividly imagined as the porn stars and filmmakers and hangers-on of "Boogie Nights." There are appetizing bits, like the two scenes between Jason Robards' Earl and Philip Seymour Hoffman's Phil. Predictably, Robards is masterly at the physical details of a dying man's exertions and exhalations. Beyond that, he taps the self-reproachful bitterness in Earl's accounting for his life. There's a thrill in seeing two generations of fine actors get a chance to act together. But how can you cast Robards and Moore as husband and wife and not give them any dialogue with each other? How can you cast Jason Robards, along with Brando probably the greatest living American actor, and keep him comatose in bed for a three-hour-plus movie -- even if he is playing a dying man?

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