Things fall down. People look up. And when it rains, it pours.
On one random day in the San Fernando Valley, a dying father, a young wife, a male caretaker, a famous lost son, a police officer in love, a boy genius, an ex-boy genius, a game show host and an estranged daughter will each become part of a dazzling multiplicity of plots, but one story.
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Been a long time since I last watched this but even though this was 3 hours long, never felt the length and I was pretty much captivated throughout (although I did pause a few times to get refill on my drink or grab a snack). The performances all around were great, most notably Tom Cruise, Melora Walters, John C. Reilly and the young Jeremy Blackman (Stanley). It does get heavy-handed and while I "get" the raining frogs scene, that took me out a bit (albeit it was towards the end). **4.0/5** As a side, the other two kids (Julia and Richard) were hacks, counting on Stanley to carry them. Something that irked me the first time I saw this, lol.
I remember seeing this in the theater with one of my friends, during our first year in college. We had all found our way back to town and... given we lived in the sticks... we ended up going to the movies out of habit and for lack of anything else to do. And I'll be honest, at the time, I walked out of the theater kind of blown away. I hadn't really seen a movie like that before. I mean, the closest thing that came to it was American Beauty, and we had only seen that a few months prior... and that had more of a plot. At the time, I'll admit, I thought it was pretty good.... and then I returned to it and now, honestly, I just think it's pretentious. Pretentious really is the best way to describe it. When you first see it, it hits you one way because it's an odd movie that you really haven't seen before. And then, when go back to it, knowing a little more about it, you realize that the plot, the characters, the entire premise of the film is about as thin and transparent as a white chiffon shirt in a wet t-shirt contest. The presentation was there, but that's really all it was. Presentation and vapidness. It's show and tell with no real tell and the hopes that frogs might get the audience thinking enough to distract them away from the fact that there's no substance beyond the presentation.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson I'm not sure if this entire film was built around Aimee Mann's "Wise Up," or if Magnolia is really a love letter to Aimee Mann herself. What's clear is that Paul Thomas Anderson wrote his sprawling, three-hour epic with her music as the foundation. Nine original songs from Mann comprise the soundtrack, her dark, sardonic style meshing perfectly with Anderson's vision of damaged people struggling through one terrible day in the San Fernando Valley. In the soundtrack liner notes, Anderson writes that all the stories branched off from one character inspired by Mann's music, adding, "You can look at the movie as the perfect memento to remember the songs that Aimee has made" (Tastemakers Music Magazine). Either way, the soundtrack is beautiful, essential, inseparable from what makes the film work. Watching all these characters descend into their own private hell for the first two acts is amazing. This is PTA's master class in casting. Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards, William H. Macy, Melora Walters — every one of them was cast perfectly. Moore's breakdown is magnetic, like watching a train wreck in slow motion; you can't look away even as you know it's going to end badly. Hoffman brought tears to my eyes with his tender performance as a nurse caring for a dying man, finding grace in the most ungraceful circumstances. Robards delivers a master class in not giving away the script until it says to do that, holding back emotion until the dam breaks. And then there's Tom Cruise, so perfect in his role as a toxic masculinity guru that it even makes him look like he can act. That alone should tell you how good Anderson is. "Wise Up" functions as the transition to the denouement, and it's brilliant, integral to the story. The film stops, or rather shifts gears entirely, as one by one each character begins singing along to Mann's song. It's structurally audacious, emotionally devastating, and it shouldn't work but absolutely does. That moment transforms Magnolia from a collection of intersecting stories into something unified, a recognition that all these broken people share the same fundamental truth: it's not going to stop until you wise up. This is Anderson at his most ambitious, most vulnerable, most willing to take enormous risks. Magnolia is messy, sprawling, occasionally excessive, but it earns every minute of its runtime through sheer emotional honesty and technical mastery. It's a film about forgiveness, regret, connection, and the possibility of grace in a graceless world, all underscored by Mann's songs that make the unspoken spoken, the unbearable bearable. This audio-visual art is a masterpiece.
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