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Magnolia***

There are more than passing similarities between Tyler Durden and Frank T.J. Mackey, the self-help guru in Magnolia--directed by Paul Thomas Anderson--who gives lucrative seminars on how to seduce women, brilliantly portrayed by Tom Cruise. But where Tyler's appeal lies in passing himself off as a nonconformist who is still a regular guy, Frank is manifestly demonic from the word go, like Rasputin on amphetamines. Nor is this the only point at which Magnolia overlaps with some of the movies discussed elsewhere in this Raft of Reviews, movies whose common denominator--target might be a more fitting word--is contemporary American civilization and its discontents. In a certain way the film might be regarded as a nodal point at which themes common to American Beauty, Fight Club, and Any Given Sunday converge. But Magnolia is not primarily a satire although it uses a popular cultural institution, the television quiz show, as a cipher for the commercialization that has become pervasive in contemporary American life just as Any Given Sunday (see below) uses the far more obvious metaphor of football for the same purpose. However, in Magnolia the quiz show scenario is itself only one part of the movie's larger narrative framework, which goes American Beauty one better by offering the spectator not just one but a pair of dysfunctional families, both of which are involved in the production of a long running, highly successful program with child contestants, "What Do Kids Know?" The senior and more important of these is the Partridge family--the tacit allusion to the squeaky-clean singing group can hardly be accidental--whose head, the producer Earl (Jason Robards), lies dying of cancer during most of the action. In addition, Earl is also the father of Frank from whom he has been estranged for many years after Earl deserted both his son and his then wife when she was dying of cancer. (The theme of malignancy, as much literal as figurative, plays a conspicuous role in Magnolia.)

In spite of taking place only during a period of twenty-four hours, Magnolia is a quite long--three hours--and sometimes uneven picture. The movie commences with a dazzling and funny if macabre prologue, after which Anderson immediately plunges the audience in medias res. While the film at one moment seems to badly wobble as I point out in the following paragraph, it is nonetheless a highly entertaining and imaginative production, with a quite effective use of color, lighting, and décor in its mise en scène. (The excellent cinematography is by Robert Elswit, the production design by William Arnold and Mark Bridges, and the editing by Dylan Tichenor.) For the average moviegoer, however, what will probably seem most impressive is the gifted ensemble playing of the main performers, including Cruise, Robards, William H. Macy as a failed one time quiz kid, Julianne Moore as the wife of the dying Earl, and in a brilliant small part, Henry Gibson as Thurston Howell, the waspishly effete patron of a tavern patronized by Macy. Last but not least, Philip Seymour Hoffmann, who gives quite a convincing performance as the obnoxious Freddy Miles in The Talented Mr. Ripley, is even more impressive in Magnolia as Phil, the male nurse who attends to Earl in his last days.

I have heard more than one person compare Magnolia with the films of Robert Altman but the only real similarity is in the propensity of both Anderson and Altman have for a large canvas. Where Altman often leaves narrative threads dangling, in Magnolia all the multiple stories turn out to be intertwined with the saga of Earl, however little obvious this might seem in the first hour or so of the movie. Nevertheless, with something like six different stories simultaneously unfolding on screen, Anderson has his hands full keeping them going, like a high-wire artist juggling a handful of plates in midair; not only do a few of the plates hit the ground but at one point his act threatens to falter altogether. He maintains a relentlessly accelerating pace throughout the first two-thirds of the film, brilliantly crosscutting and building up to that evening's episode of the quiz show, marked by a double catastrophe. First, the program's star, the whiz kid Stanley (Jeremy Blackman), refuses to answer any more questions after peeing in his pants, and then, the show's not-so-genial host, Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), who is also dying of cancer, collapses on camera. Unfortunately, after this point Magnolia shifts into the cathartic mode, with several characters chanting a mea culpa on the soundtrack about their past sins. While I have no argument with the thesis the film reiterates from beginning to end, that the past lives on in the present and that the attempt to disavow the past is bound to lead to disaster, to hear the idea monotonously repeated in this way is no more illuminating than listening to one of Frank's inane mantras--and here the movie hovers on the verge of grinding to a fatal halt. But just when Anderson seems in peril of falling off his high wire altogether, he succeeds in getting his story back into motion with a surprise rain of frogs, in a sequence worthy of one of the slapstick masterpieces of Chaplin or Keaton. (Cognoscenti of the occult who noted one of the books of Charles Fort on Stanley's desk will immediately make a connection here, although a friend of mind also picked up an audience member at the quiz show carrying a sign with a reference to Exodus 8:2 or 8:3.)

In a less obvious way, there also links between Bringing Out the Dead and Magnolia, but the differences outweigh the similarities. First of all, Magnolia, with the exception of the implausible natural occurrence alluded to above, is solidly realistic. If Anderson constantly harps on the role unlikely coincidences play in the lives of his characters, it is not for the sake of using these coincidences as signs to point to some more abstract level of signification--as is certainly the case with Scorsese, who clearly invests Frank's vocation with a transcendent meaning that goes beyond the immediate facts of the scenario. The chain of circumstances that brings together the otherwise disparate characters in Magnolia is if anything the sign of a cosmic joker in the deck of existence, a wild card that prevents life from reducing to no more than an endlessly ongoing series of predictably repetitious events. Secondly, although Anderson's characters like Scorsese's live in an inferno, the respective infernal regions are quite dissimilar. Scorsese's hell is a donnée of his story, big city life as the concrete image of things as they are, and he is far too intelligent to offer snap explanations of how things got that way. By contrast, the denizens of Magnolia reside in an inferno they themselves have labored mightily to produce, but without their own knowledge as the agents of an exploitative system of social relations symbolized by the quiz show in the first place. Let no one imagine, however, that life was so much more unspoiled in the early days of the republic.