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MAGNOLIA (bring large coffee and extra pillows)
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PULP FICTION meets SHORT CUTS in this mesmerizing but amorphous three-hour visual epic about miserable Los Angelenos (where else could it possibly be?) by talented but inexperienced and undisciplined writer/ director Paul Thomas Anderson.
Judging by this movie, Anderson is a better director than writer. There is marvelous acting throughout and great if busy camera work (especially in the first half) - fast zooms, ornate pirouetting camera shots, hand-shot chases through corridors of kaleidoscopic conversations, all Film-School artifice by way of ER or Homicide episodes. The movie opens with an aggressively loud sound track obstructing dialog, almost as if the director wanted you not to understand the characters, lest you make sense too soon of the relationships and become bored.
Virtually all the focus characters (of which there are about a dozen) are miserable because of family ills. The movie's recurring, even oppressive, theme is parents (mostly fathers) abusing children (mostly sons) and creating lingering damage with which the characters cope in variations of camouflage and denial that manifest in rage and tears (if the Academy Awards were tabulated based on total screen time spent weeping, MAGNOLIA would win hands down). Only two are nice people (John C. Reilly as a phlegmatic optimistic cop, the superb Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a gentle but not fey nurse). The movie tacitly but relentlessly asserts that for men, success is bought by transmuting childhood pain into adult neurosis, drive, or aggression. Women are uniformly deceived and suffering. And the visual, well-acted suffering comes to overwhelm the movie in a Slough of Despond, becoming tiring.
Throughout, the movie is talky; in the first hour, this is cleverly disguised with all the visual flash. The middle hour is static and redundant, with multiple scenes for each character where one would have done. There are also overlapping characters who should have been conflated - for instance, two fathers (Jason Robards, Philip Baker Hall), each dying of cancer and trying to apologize to their wives and children, but always indirectly (they talk to a surrogate rather than the victim). This, by the way, is the signal of an inexperienced author who is afraid of having a scene where two strong characters go toe-to-toe.
In the third hour, if you are still with us, Anderson's talent overcomes his frenetic technique. The background music dies down and the characters move to their personal crises, eventually wrapped by a simultaneous externality - which I won't tell you, because its surprise is absurd and funny - like the earthquake in Altman's SHORT CUTS (a movie this greatly resembles). And it contains the one absolutely exquisite moment, where a series of our miserable focus characters, alone, individually sings to him or herself the words to the same sad song whose soundtrack score swells over them all. They are auditorially linked, and linked through our awareness of their lonely pain. That moment shows some real story-telling potential, even as many other elements of the movie show a director not under control. (And like a child saying "Lookit me!" he throws in a couple of annoying directorial intrusions, as when Hoffman, talking to a stranger on the phone, says, "this is the part of the movie where you help me," or when the camera zooms in on a newspaper snippet stuck in the corner of a picture frame: "but it did happen." Too clever by half, as the Brits would say.)
As for acting, many of Anderson's BOOGIE NIGHTS players are back, all good. Bill Macy is the weakest of these but always serviceable. Hoffman is the best, much more believable and subtle than Tom Cruise's over-the-top performance as male self-help guru Frank T. J. Mackey. In RISKY BUSINESS, Tom danced in underwear and socks; here he loses the socks and shirt but is still a briefs-not-boxers kind of guy. The fun of that role is Cruise's obvious enjoyment at playing, against type, a mesmerizing total shit whose course, Seduce and Destroy, features workshops on topics like "HOW TO FAKE THAT YOU ARE NICE AND CARING." As Groucho Marx once said, "Sincerity, that's the key. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
So Go, bring a large black coffee and extra pillows.