Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

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

[12/17/99]

Movie Review
"Stuart Little"
The beloved book about a mouse with human parents becomes a small wonder of a family movie.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[12/17/99]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
On the "The New Latinaires 2," transnational artists fusing Latin, house and electronic music suggest that the Ricky Martin explosion was not a fluke.
By Michelle Goldberg
[12/17/99]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Two Buck Owens reissues imagine Christmas as a mostly secular holiday.
By Gary Kaufman
[12/16/99]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Mogwai's migrainous wankery has absolutely no potential for popular appeal.
By Carlene Bauer
[12/15/99]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

But Anderson's touch with the actors feels off here. As Claudia, Melora Walters has to be a coke-induced whirligig (but a washed-out whirligig) for the duration of the movie and she wears out her welcome before we get to know anything about her. Julianne Moore has it even worse. In an interview with Time Out New York, Moore said, "I found the part [of Linda] very arduous. It's really very difficult to try to find a way to make you understand her, because she doesn't understand herself. She isn't what she appears to be, she isn't what she wants to be. She's at a place of real turbulence." That may be a polite way of saying that the role isn't really written. Anderson requires Moore to be kept in a state of hysteria as Linda races from shrink to lawyer to pharmacist, never getting far enough from her own guilt over her dying husband.

She's startling, but then Moore often is. If there's a flaw to her acting, it's that she's so frighteningly smart that sometimes her intelligence projects through the roles themselves -- what we perceive are Moore's thought processes instead of her character's. (That turns out to be a blessing in her current performance in "The End of the Affair.") In "Magnolia," when Anderson clears enough space to allow Moore to focus Linda's desperation, as she does in the scene where she castigates a pair of chemists who have looked askance at the painkiller prescriptions she is filling for Earl, she hones the character's grief, rage and self-hatred to a diamond-hard point.

But the attention and energy that Anderson should have paid to delineating that character, and to fleshing out the others, he seems to have lavished on the scenes with Tom Cruise as Frank Mackey conducting the seminars for his inflated how-to-pick-up-girls system called "Seduce and Destroy." Anderson, who was contacted by Cruise after "Boogie Nights" and told that the actor wanted to work with him, is clearly thrilled to have such a big star in his movie. And it speaks well for Cruise's taste that he wanted to work with Anderson. The scenes he's been given -- big flashy monologues where Frank exhorts his followers to "worship the cock and tame the cunt," and a long encounter with a TV reporter who's determined to unlock the secrets of his past -- allow Cruise to expend his performer's energy. But he doesn't have an actor's sensibility to match, and it becomes painfully obvious when he has to play a painful confrontation scene with Robards. He relies on flash when he has to dig down into himself.

Part of the problem with "Magnolia" can be blamed on Anderson's structure. Using Aimee Mann's songs to comment on and counterpoint the action, Anderson has conceived of "Magnolia" as something like a sonata on the theme of past sins and the limits of forgiveness as played out among parents and children. The technique is very sophisticated, with Anderson smoothly cutting from story to story. It's also very frustrating; the intercutting only makes it more obvious that we aren't getting beneath the surface of these people. One of the biggest barriers of all is the music itself. When Mann's songs aren't playing, Jon Brion's score is, and I don't think I've ever heard a more distracting use of music in a movie. It's wall-to-wall music, used in a manner that often appears to be heading the action towards some kind of climax which never arrives.

If anything can be said for the structure, it's that it delays the revelation of how obvious and mushy Anderson's message is. "Boogie Nights" was big and flawed, particularly in the violent second half's borrowings from Scorsese and Tarantino, but the most extraneous out-of-place scenes were the explosive arguments between Mark Wahlberg's porn-stud-to-be Eddie and his mother (Joanna Gleason). Those scenes could have been the taking-off point for "Magnolia." I didn't know what those scenes were doing in "Boogie Nights" until I heard Anderson in interviews talking about his stormy relationship with his own mother. And when you know that Anderson's father Ernie was the Cleveland horror-movie host known as Ghoulardi, the fathers in "Magnolia" who work in TV enforce the autobiographical connection. But part of the letdown of "Magnolia" is that, in working out what may be personal issues on parent-child conflicts, Anderson has come up with something that's rather shockingly less sophisticated than "Boogie Nights'" depiction of pornographers as extended surrogate family. The critics who didn't dig "Boogie Nights" specifically rejected that aspect of the movie. They seemed to want the easy reassurances offered to them by every TV crime drama still depicting the porn business as nothing but a chamber of horrors.

In his depiction of real families in "Magnolia," Anderson has fallen back on pop-psych banalities about abandonment and the inner child. This is a movie that climaxes with an act of God which acts as a kind of gateway to healing and forgiveness, and which (if I read it correctly) appears to suggest that a child has the gift of prophecy. When you hear a character say "It's a mistake to confuse children with angels," you realize that, on some basic level, Anderson is refuting that statement. He wants us to see children as innocents, and adults as nothing more than the protective shells of those damaged children. The movie's revelations of traumas and betrayals feel as if they spring out of something very personal for Anderson. But the revelations that parents aren't perfect because they act like human beings seems like the kind of thing a filmmaker of his sophistication should have grasped long ago.

"Magnolia" is the sort of bad film that's clearly the misstep of a very talented filmmaker. At times, as in the jokey grimness of the prologue or a dumb crack about Jimmy Gator being a family man while we see him screwing a young woman in his office, Anderson gives into a smirky cynical smartass tone that's beneath his talents. He's a director who puts his faith in his actors to carry out every good and bad idea he has. And while the film awkwardly juggles realism and stylization, as usual Anderson's physical settings are rendered with hard specificity. As shot by Robert Elswit, "Magnolia" makes you feel like you might be able to drive down the San Fernando Valley streets we see and find every bus stop and convenience store.

For all the weak patches of "Magnolia," Anderson is capable of doing things that knock you flat, like the scene where the characters are linked by his use of Aimee Mann's song "Wise Up," a moment that suggests a collaboration between Jacques Demy and Robert Altman. The almost certain commercial failure of "Magnolia" could send Anderson back to something on the scale of "Hard Eight," which wouldn't be bad for him. The strict discipline of that movie didn't allow him to swing, didn't make way for the wild jags of humor and wealth of incident that kept your eyes popping at "Boogie Nights." But the ambition of "Boogie Nights" has become a sprawl in "Magnolia." Anderson needs to find a way to integrate his wilder impulses with a more stringent discipline. "Magnolia" is his bid at an adult movie after the adolescent sideshow of "Boogie Nights," but it feels appreciably less grown up. Anderson was better off dealing with what goes into the mouths of babes than what comes out of them.
salon.com | Dec. 17, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon