We are all members of the human race. Every day, we interact with dozens, if not hundreds of individuals. Some are intentional, some are accidental. Some encounters are lengthy, some are fleeting. Sometimes we surround ourselves with objects and artificial environments. Sometimes we merely die, and are "taken" either at the most inopportune or the most fortuitous of circumstances.
When director Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia was released in 1999, it was met with ambiguous results at best. The biggest criticism of the work? If the point was to highlight the seemingly random encounters people have in every day life, Anderson was too cryptic and unclear in his narrative. The coincidences, moviegoers claimed, were overshadowed by an unexpected and apocalyptic ending that is separate from anything that has come before it.
But is Magnolia's ending all that out of place? Is it any more ironic than life itself? The biggest mystery of all is how we as human beings are given a short time on this planet to live our lives, and how we instead choose to succumb to bitterness, resentment, and disrespect for our fellow man. All of the characters in this brilliant picture have their own assumptions and their own secrets they are desperate to face or ignore, but more importantly they are all desperate to find love, and that is what links them together like petals on a magnolia flower.
This ambitious work follows a day in the lives of a dozen or so people in the San Fernando Valley area. The tapestry that is formed when their stories overlap brings to mind the three unities of the classic playwrights: Unity of time, Unity of place, and Unity of action. It takes place within a 24 hour period, there are extended speeches, and even some deus ex machina moments (unexpected chances of fate that intervene in their lives) thrown in for good measure. Indeed, this is a Greek tragedy and comedy all at once.
It stars a bevy of actors who each give top-notch performances. Tom Cruise is Frank T.J. Mackey, the quick fix spokesman for a brash and bold seminar entitled "Seduce and Destroy"; Jason Robards plays his estranged terminally ill father, an executive from the golden era of television; Julianne Moore plays Robards's wife, a prescription-addicted woman who has realized too late she actually loves him; Philip Seymour Hoffman is Robards's empathetic nurse; Philip Baker Hall is a veteran host of a kids gameshow run by Robards's network; Jeremy Blackmore is a nervous kid genius contestant; William H. Macy is a former contestant on the same show who is struggling to find purpose in a pointed mid-life crisis; Melinda Dillon is Baker Hall's wife, about to stumble onto a dark and disturbing truth; Melora Walters is their daughter, a drug-addicted woman who likes to play her music loud; John C. Reilly is the cop who, when answering a noise complaint from her apartment building, finds himself falling in love with Walters. There are many other supporting performances too, and all are uniformly excellent.
I could go on and on about this film's attributes, including how Anderson casually drops subtle references to the book of Exodus, thus foreshadowing the bizarre final half hour, and encapsulating the 10 Commandments that are addressed and broken along the way. There's also a brave sequence where the characters take turns singing lines from an Aimee Mann song; the sheer power of this moment is a testament to how attached we have become to these people.
Perhaps the most infuriating thing about a movie like Magnolia is the response that it illicits from lazy viewers who simply say they "don't like it" without giving a valid reason and without giving it a real chance. The fact that its plot isn't transparent to them, the fact that it isn't packed with car crashes or explosions, the fact that it is real, in the sense that everyone is lonely and everyone has to deal with loneliness. The symbols here aren't drawn for us with crayons. It's a film that is open to interpretation, but is insightful for those who bother to take a moment to stop, look at it, and observe that, because we are living, breathing human beings, we can think about this picture and discuss its subjects, meanings, and infinite possibilities. A few minutes into the picture, the song "One" -- the loneliest number -- introduces us to these constantly compelling characters. By its conclusion, I realized that if, in our own lives, we ever find ourselves singing that song, it is merely our inability to forgive, to love, and to live each day to the fullest, that is the true cause of our melancholy.
