Magnolia
Paul Thomas Anderson (1999)
A quarter-century on, Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film remains his best (as far as I know: I’ve not seen Hard Eight (1996) or Punch-Drunk Love (2002)). Anderson was still only in his twenties when he made Magnolia, and it really feels like the work of a young, precocious filmmaker – eager to impress, crammed with themes and characters: as if the writer-director’s future in cinema depended on it. The elements aren’t all equally satisfying but you stay interested in how each one of them plays out. Not everyone was or is keen on Magnolia. Misogyny, betrayal and child abuse of various kinds are all to the fore. As with Spike Jonze’s (or perhaps Charlie Kaufman’s) Adaptation (2002), I can understand why people find Anderson’s magnum opus – which runs a few minutes over three hours – infuriating or conceited. But I liked it a lot when I first saw it and find that I still do.
The title could refer to Magnolia Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, where Anderson’s story takes place – over the course of a single day, the following night and the next morning. After plenty of gruelling episodes, the film ends on a hopeful note: the title could equally refer to the resilience of the magnolia tree, able to survive in extremes of heat and cold. It seems just as likely, though, that Magnolia got its name simply from Anderson’s experience developing the script, which ‘kept blossoming’ (as quoted by Wikipedia). He was also candid that he felt compelled to write for and cast certain actors as much as create particular characters (Henry Gibson, for example: ‘I really wanted to work with that guy,’ he told Sight and Sound (March 2000)). Magnolia, which contains many references to other movies, was made by an ardent and a voracious film fan. Since that description also calls to mind one of Anderson’s near-contemporaries, Quentin Tarantino, it’s worth stressing an important difference between this film and what can reasonably be termed a typical Tarantino film, where even real history and the human behaviour that went with it are liable to be sidelined by cinema history and imperatives.
Magnolia, in contrast, is just as much concerned with cinema’s limitations, as Anderson also explained in that 2000 S&S interview:
‘I think part of my job is to acknowledge how many movies I’ve seen and how much that informs our lives. Movies are a big influence on how we deal with death, with family relationships, and I wanted to show that. But they can also be a complete betrayal in terms of how to live your life.’
Only an extreme film fanatic could begin to think that movies might serve as a reliable moral guide through the real world – and then decide it needs to be made clear they’re not. Yet Anderson makes this an emotionally potent part of Magnolia. At one point, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, making a desperate phone call, tells the person on the other end of the line:
‘I know this all seems silly. I know that maybe I sound ridiculous, like maybe this is the scene of the movie where the guy is trying to get a-hold of the long-lost son, but this is that scene. Y’know? I think they have those scenes in movies because they’re true, because they really happen. And you gotta believe me: this is really happening. I mean, I can give you my phone number and you can call me back if you wanna check with whoever you can check this with, but don’t leave me hanging on this – please – please. … See, this is the scene of the movie where you help me out …’
It’s also one of the movie’s most affecting moments. Seymour Hoffman’s great acting enables him to cut through, without expelling, the self-awareness of his lines. The result: we feel his character’s painful urgency and, at the same time, understand the importance to Anderson of the point his script is making.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Phil Parma, one of Magnolia‘s nine main characters (on my count: others may reach different totals). Phil is a nurse privately caring for terminally ill television producer Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), whose much-younger second wife, Linda (Julianne Moore), dreads seeing to the formalities of Earl’s impending death and is riddled with guilt that she’s been serially unfaithful to him. LAPD officer Jim Kurring (John C Reilly) is called to the apartment of Claudia Wilson (Melora Walters), where neighbours have reported sounds of a heated argument, followed by incessant loud music. The neighbours obviously can’t see that Claudia is also snorting cocaine; Jim can but, before he leaves the apartment, he asks Claudia on a date late that evening. She has been arguing with her father, Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), host of a long-running TV quiz show, ‘What Do Kids Know?’ The star turn of the show’s current series is Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman). The first winner of ‘What Do Kids Know?’, back in 1968, was Donnie Smith, who’s not fared well since his TV triumph. For a start, his parents took the prize money that Donnie won on the show. Then he was struck by lightning. Now in his forties, Quiz Kid Donnie (William H Macy) is distraught when he’s fired from his job and thereby deprived of the means to pay for the dental treatment that he believes could bring him happiness. Having fallen in love with a braces-wearing barman, Donnie has a fantasy that, if he can only get braces for his own teeth, his love will no longer be unrequited. Last but not least of the nine, Frank T J Mackey (Tom Cruise) might be euphemistically described as a motivational speaker, for men only. To be more specific, he’s the author of ‘the Seduce and Destroy System of audio and videocassettes that will teach you the techniques to have any hard-body blonde dripping to wet your dock’.
Frank is revealed to be the estranged son of Earl Partridge from his first marriage. On his deathbed, Earl tells Phil he wants to contact his son, hence Phil’s phone call to someone on Frank’s team. We find out that Earl was also the founding producer of ‘What Do Kids Know?’ Like Earl, Jimmy Gator turns out to have terminal cancer and is estranged from his only child: in the high-volume showdown with Claudia, he makes a crude bid to patch things up by telling her he’ll soon die. That’s not enough for Claudia, oppressed by memories of her father’s sexually abusing her as a child. Frank J T Mackey goes straight from a lecture – to an admiring audience that brays approval of his injunction to ‘respect the cock and tame the cunt’ – into an interview with Gwenovier (April Grace), a cautious but determinedly probing journalist who has done her research. Gwenovier has discovered that, as a teenager, Frank was left to care for his dying mother when Earl walked out on her.
Anderson prefigures these connections between apparently unrelated characters in Magnolia’s zany yet ominous prologue. Its narrator (voiced by Ricky Jay, who’ll appear in the film proper as the current producer of ‘What Do Kids Know?’) describes three curious (fictional) incidents, reconstructed on the screen, which took place in 1911, 1983 and 1961. The details of these incidents, grimly entertaining as they all are, matter less than the conclusions the narrator draws from them in turn. ‘I would like to think this was only a matter of chance,’ he infers from what happened in 1911, despite the remarkable coincidences involved. After the 1983 episode, the narrator’s confidence is waning – ‘I am trying to think this was only a matter of chance’. The incredible collision of events in 1961 is enough for an unequivocal change of heart:
‘It is in the humble opinion of this narrator that this is not just ‘something that happened.’ This cannot be ‘one of those things.’ This, please, cannot be that. And for what I would like to say, I can’t. This was not just a matter of chance. … These strange things happen all the time.’
Although the accumulating resonances between the people and stories in Anderson’s main narrative seem meant to reinforce this last conclusion, they’re not nearly as unaccountable as the prologue happenings – indeed, some connections are what you might expect from the set-up. In his bar of choice, Donnie tells his hard luck story (‘I used to be smart but now I’m stupid’) to anyone prepared to listen. No one is, certainly not elderly Thurston Howell (Henry Gibson), Donnie’s usual neighbour at the bar, who shares his taste for braces Brad (Craig Kvinsland): Howell dismisses Donnie’s litany of regrets with a series of waspishly heartless putdowns. His parents’ appropriation of the quiz show prize pot naturally figures prominently in Donnie’s tale of woe; back in the latest series of ‘What Do Kids Know?’, Stanley Spector is soon wilting under parental pressure. In a kids-vs-adults team special, Stanley loses his winning touch and his nerve. Refused permission to use the toilet during a commercial break, he wets himself, which further enrages his aggressively pushy father, Rick (Michael Bowen). When the broadcast resumes, Stanley flees the set and the TV studio. Bested by quietly persistent Gwenovier, Frank Mackey also loses it and quits his interview, only to be confronted by an emergency phone call. Remorseful Linda Partridge visits Earl’s lawyer (Michael Murphy) to see if her husband’s will can be changed so that she doesn’t inherit the fortune she thinks she doesn’t deserve. The lawyer suggests that she renounce the will so that Frank inherits. Linda, despite saying no to the suggestion, takes a drugs overdose to end her life. Frank meanwhile arrives at his father’s home and takes his place at Earl’s bedside.
That last development begins the shift towards reconciliation, or the possibility of reconciliation, in Magnolia’s later stages, though this doesn’t happen for everyone. When Jimmy Gator’s loyal wife Rose (Melinda Dillon) demands to know if Claudia’s accusations about him are true, he says he can’t remember if he abused his daughter; that’s enough for Jimmy to lose Rose as well as Claudia. For others, the upswing is qualified or uncertain. Dixon (Emmanuel Johnson), a kid whose cheeky profanity shocked Jim Kurring in their encounter early in the story, discovers Linda unconscious in her car in a parking lot. Dixon calls an ambulance, though not before stealing money from Linda’s purse. She’s taken to hospital, where Frank visits her and she looks set to recover: whether this amounts to a happy ending for her is hard to say. Back home, Stanley speaks for several children in the story when he goes to his father’s bedroom and tells Rick he should be nicer to him. Rick, like Earl and Jimmy a man more sinning than sinned against, doesn’t agree or disagree; he merely tells his son to go back to bed. Donnie decides to steal cash from his former workplace. He’s no sooner done so than he decides to return the money but can now only get back inside the building by climbing to the roof. This manoeuvre attracts the attention of Jim Kurring, who will be central to the sense of healing in the film’s finale.
Before that, Anderson – despite the multiple connections he has brought to light – needs something to pull all his principals together and opts for a coup de théâtre as singular as his prologue. The San Fernando weather has been deteriorating throughout the day. By late afternoon, there’s a continuous downpour. Cats and dogs are mentioned more than once; in the event, the sky starts raining frogs. Very heavy rainfall is sometimes described as ‘biblical’. Frogs descending from the sky (as distinct from emerging from the Nile – see Exodus 8:2, which crops up in ‘What Do Kids Know?’) weren’t among the Plagues of Egypt but there is something biblical about Magnolia’s frogfall – which DP Robert Elswit, editor Dylan Tichenor and the sound team help Anderson realise to startling effect. The apocalyptic deluge also encapsulates the film’s persisting combination of horror and humour. A frog hits Donnie, who falls from the office building he’s trying to scale and smashes his teeth on the ground. Frogs crash through a skylight in the Gator home as Jimmy points a gun at his head, causing him to shoot at his TV screen instead of himself. Driving over to Claudia, Rose has a car accident thanks to a frog onslaught but makes it inside her daughter’s apartment, where she and Claudia hug and try to shelter each other. Linda’s ambulance also crashes en route to the hospital. Even Earl Partridge, at death’s door, is briefly awakened by the racket overhead. Earl sees Frank sitting beside him then breathes his last.
The voiceover narrator now returns, along with a high-speed reprise of the prologue incidents, to confirm the morals of the story – that ‘these strange things happen all the time’, that ‘We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us’, and so on. Anderson doesn’t give the voiceover the last word, though. The downpour includes one non-amphibian element – the gun that Jim lost earlier in the day, while trying and failing to make an arrest. On his date with Claudia, they agree to be honest with each other. Jim admits incompetence as a cop and the failures of his personal life (he’s not been on a date until now since his marriage ended, three years ago). Claudia thinks Jim, once he knows all about her, won’t want to see her again but he assures her he will. Before making good on that assurance, he helps hapless Donnie return the stolen money. Donnie lisps, through bloodstained Kleenex, that he realises the foolishness of his dental dream. Back outside, with both men slithering on the rubble of dead frogs left from the overnight storm, Jim suggests to Donnie ‘a buddy of mine down at the med center, he’d probably do quite a deal on a set of dentures, if you’re interested in that. He’s in training, you know he’s not a dentist yet, but he’s real good at corrective oral surgery …’ Jim then gives himself a heartfelt pep talk before returning to Claudia’s apartment. The film ends on her smiling face.
Music is important to Magnolia and the numbers sung by Aimee Mann dominate. These include, as well as her own compositions, Mann’s version of Harry Nilsson’s ‘One’ (‘… is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do’). I liked the ‘Wise Up’ sequence, during which a succession of the film’s characters joins in with Mann’s vocals (as well as a sequence scored to the original of Supertramp’s ‘The Logical Song’) but otherwise preferred the soundtrack’s instrumental side, the work of Jon Brion (who’d also done the score for Anderson’s debut feature, Hard Eight). This is a rare instance where seemingly continuous use of film music pays dramatic dividends, increasing narrative impetus and, because the music is playing whoever’s on the screen, underlining Anderson’s idea that his dramatis personae are all in the same boat. Brion’s score is such a constant presence in Magnolia that you notice when it’s not playing – most notably during Earl Partridge’s deathbed monologue. (Robert Elswit’s lighting renders this the words of a speaking skull.) It seems that Anderson turns the music off to acknowledge the stature of Jason Robards, appearing here in what would be his final film role. Fair enough.
There’s plenty of fine acting on display. More remarkably, it’s the actors playing unarguably decent characters who are outstanding – Seymour Hoffman and John C Reilly, who’s touching and funny: he gives police officer Jim a wonderfully authentic modesty and honesty. I saw Magnolia this time in BFI’s Tom Cruise season: Cruise has more screen time in the film than I remembered and is more interesting than usual, although sustained genuine emotion, which breaks through in the latter stages of Frank Mackey’s interview, still eludes him in Frank’s reunion with his father. In his relatively small role, Henry Gibson richly repays Anderson’s eagerness to work with him. Gibson’s performance in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) no doubt had something to do with that and Altman was clearly a strong influence on Anderson’s filmmaking (the large cast of miscellaneous characters in Magnolia is Altmanesque, of course). It’s clear too that Altman came to see Anderson as a kindred spirit. By the time he made his last film, A Prairie Home Companion (2005), Altman was in such poor health that a standby director had to be named for insurance purposes, in case he couldn’t finish the shoot: Anderson was the standby. Not all of Magnolia stays in the mind for long after a viewing: there’s an argument for seeing the whole thing as a performance, held together by its own momentum and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ingenuity. Yet there are moments and people – characters and actors – that you don’t forget. Except for Nashville, I don’t think Anderson’s inspiration Robert Altman ever made a better film than this one.
10 May 2025