|
MAGNOLIA Send This Review to a Friend
Paul Thomas Anderson's success with "Boogie Nights" apparently encouraged his ego to run rampant with "Magnolia," a bloated, pretentious three-hour indulgence. The juggling of assorted characters during a single day at crisis points in their lives, which sometimes relate, is along the lines of Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" and "Nashville." The similarity stops there. Anderson's inflated concepts lack Altman's wit as well as his cinematic creativity. And let's not even mention him in the same breath with Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
This is not to say that there are not a few interesting characters in Anderson's opus, and that the film doesn't have its stellar moments. But nothing here is worth being dragged out ad infinitum, as Anderson has done. Every time the film seems to be ending we're subjected to more, including a Biblical-style plague descending from the heavens as if humanity were being punished for its folly. None of these characters rises to the level of being worth such divine wrath. Oh, maybe one does for the sin of abusive incest.
Anderson sets the stage with a prologue about past coincidences, one of which is quite a funny dose of the macabre. A woman aims a shotgun at her husband, misses and fires through the window, killing their son just as he's passing by from his suicidal dive off the roof. Suicide has turned into murder. It is in this context that the film examines a compendium of characters and situations that are crisscrossed throughout the film to the accompaniment of a relentless, rumbling but numbing score apparently meant to add the missing weight to what's on screen.
We meet, among others, a dying old man (Jason Robards), his frenetic, conflicted young wife (Julianne Moore), his in-house nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a genius of a child quiz show contestant under abusive pressure (Jeremy Blackman), a grown former child quiz show contestant now all screwed up (W.H. Macy), the doomed quiz show host (Philip Baker Hall), a decent but bumbling cop (John C. Reilly) and a frenzied cocaine addict to whom the cop is attracted (Melora Walters).
The highest profile participant is a long-haired Tom Cruise as a macho guru who stars on television with his hyped-up ranting imploring men to be ruthless in feeding their egos and conquering women with deceit. Cruise spews vulgarities like an automatic gun spews bullets. It is an obnoxious, ridiculous role, but presumably he was attracted to it because it is so different from anything that he's played.
As the film wears on various connections are made and coincidences occur to bear out the point of the prologue. The actors are all good--no problem there--and there is some humor along with the irony. But a more skillful and controlled director would have honed all of this into a tightly constructed piece instead of wearing out an audience. Or else he would have had much more to say than Anderson's relatively simple-minded, obvious take on human flaws. A New Line Cinema release.
|