Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson) 1999
P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia
is probably my favorite film of the 1990’s. It’s such an astonishing piece
of work, that I must have seen it a dozen times (four times in the theater)
despite its running time of three hours and eight minutes. Few films have ever
been more excellently acted or directed. In my opinion, it’s one of the
all-time classics. Those who write it off as overblown or pretentious are
probably not looking closely enough at what Anderson puts on screen. For a film
this ambitious, it’s got a great sense of humor. The specifics of the
characters in the film are often incredibly funny. There are such an astounding
number of “big scenes” packed into the film’s duration, that other
sprawling films (such as the oft-compared Short
Cuts) look anemic by comparison.
The film’s narrative structure is amazingly complex. It
is set in LA, where they make movies, and it's central theme can be stated as
"What happens when things don't happen as they do in the movies?" So
to hammer in that theme, Anderson starts with a trio of faux-documentaries
(documentary cinema is supposed to be truth, but it's as much a lie as the rest
of it [since we're getting an edited, single viewpoint], especially here where
the stories are lies). As the film progresses, it escalates the level of
narrative falseness. It continues to reference the lying media with the exposure
of consecutively greater misdeeds, such as the phony Jimmy Gator news story, the
Speak and Destroy lecture, the quiz show which feeds on the preciousness of its
child geniuses. At one point, it even blames one of the great bad guys of
melodramatic fiction – the Freemasons! This narrative stretching does not
continue unchecked. In the third hour the film seems unable to contain itself
and almost explodes. Near the end of the film there’s an absolute hysteria
running throughout the cast. The rules of moviedom have run amok, and they’re
all being hit by the consequences. Magnolia’s world becomes not a reality, but
a movie where reality is supposed to exist, but things are playing out as in a
movie. We have descended (ascended?) literally into a musical, and our reality
(and the reality that the movie had in its first hour) is disconnected from what
is shown on screen. Yet, we feel closer to it than ever, since Anderson has
subverted our expectations of what a film should promise/deliver, so we can
relate to how the characters onscreen feel. The explanation the film offers up,
which is that "these things happen" is at once the most naive and most
wise statement in the entire film.
Anderson deconstruction of the melodrama shows how phony
its solutions are, and as a cautionary tale. He warns us not to expect a pat
resolution or explanation for any events in life, as it may not be coming. The
film’s ending is deliberately ambiguous and unclear (though optimistic since
the protagonists seem to have learned from their experiences). Despite all of
the histrionics, Anderson seems to be trying to connect with audiences
emotionally only so we’re more likely to accept his intellectual message, not
the other way around (using intellectual techniques to better engage us
emotionally). Many of his scenes ascend to high drama (and even operatic levels)
despite their relative mundanity. That’s because he’s created a world where
things happen in movie terms that’s populated by characters that think
they’re living a real life. That tension is astonishing and justifies the
extraordinarily overblown feel. It’s no coincidence that the film was released
right before the year 2000 hit. The millennial feeling that the world as we know
it is ending is the defining emotion here, and has never been better put on
film.
**** Masterpiece
Jeremy Heilman 11/14/01