Grand prix - Best Film of the Year
2000

Magnolia
by Dave Kehr

Los Angeles inevitably invites visions of the apocalypse. A city poised on the edge of a continent, over a massive fault line that could open at any time, consisting largely of shabby, thin walled buildings made of crumbling stucco and splintering concrete, it contains the promise of its own destruction. It is an end waiting to happen, the end of the American continent, the end of America, perhaps the end of our whole fragile system of global capitalism and petty materialism. The city is a shell around a empty egg, and it will not take much to crush it.

In Paul Thomas Anderson's sweeping, novelistic Magnolia, the end of Los Angeles does arrive, but not in any form we have been expecting. It does not come with race riots, class warfare, natural disaster, nuclear war, environment asphyxiation, or any of the other dozens of threats we read of daily in the newspapers. The end comes, instead, through the agency of something ancient and biblical, through an Old Testament plague - a rain of frogs that descends one violent night, leaving the streets covered in slick, quivering bodies. Suddenly, everything stops - no traffic can move, no human can take a step, without sinking into something soft and vulnerable, without crushing a life.

Anderson's film follows a dozen main characters, each one of them soft and vulnerable in his or her own way, though some have hid themselves within thin, hard shells of their own creation. The central, most exemplary figure is the self-help guru Frank "T.J." Mackey, played by Tom Cruise: he preaches to audiences of downtrodden men, instructing them in the cynical seduction of women, teaching them how to hide their feelings and indulge their most selfish, superficial desires. He is a terrifyingly self-confident figure, and is played by Cruise, in what is certainly the finest performance he has given to date, as a caricature of his "Mission: Impossible" persona - a man without doubts, sure of his effect on others and sure of getting his way.

But in the course of the film - in the course, that is, of an interview with a TV journalist (April Grace) who knows T.J's secret - the confidence is stripped away, and an almost fetal vulnerability returns. He is not the man he has made himself out to be, but the frightened son of a dying television producer (Jason Robards) to whom he has not spoken in years; by the end of the movie, father and son are reunited, held together in a sense of fear and uncertainty. Between the curled, helpless old man and the angry, inarticulate boy, it is difficult to tell who is the father and who is the son; the generations have collapsed, time has reversed itself.

Like many of the characters in Magnolia, Cruise and Robards are united by secret connections that emerge over the course of the film. Sometimes those connections are those of parentage: Melora Walters, a drug dependent single woman, turns out to be the daughter (abused?) of a successful television quiz show host (Philip Baker Hall). At other times, and more mysteriously, they are relations of doubling - there are two television producers in the film, each with unhappy wives (Julianne Moore and Melinda Dillon), two child prodigies (one, played by William Macy, has grown up into an unhappy salesman with a crush on a bartender, the other, played by Jeremy Blackman, is a contestant on Hall's TV show, who seems eerily like Macy's younger self). And there are two caretaker figures in the film, two guardian angels who appear to act out of entirely selfless motives: a compassionate policeman (John C. Reilly) who tries to rescue the drug-addicted Walters, and a male nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who cares for the dying Robards, and takes it upon himself to reunite the old man with his long lost son.

These hidden patterns are what make sense of the world for Paul Thomas Anderson - patterns that prove there is a design behind everything, however obscure, that coincidence is never merely that, but the working out of some kind of fate, that underlying the apparent chaos and disconnectedness of modern urban life there is a vague, distant notion of a human family. The rain of frogs provides one kind of coming together, a sense of common vulnerability that leads to a possibility of redemption. The film's other great, abstract sequence - in which widely separated characters are discovered singing along to the same despairing Aimee Mann song - creates a sense of togetherness in loneliness, of an unbearable isolation tempered only by the fact that it is universal. Magnolia is so moving precisely because it is positioned between endings and beginnings, between hope and despair, between life and death. We are all alone, Anderson suggests, and therefore we are all in this together.

Dave Kehr
© FIPRESCI 2000