Magnolia

For Paul Thomas Anderson, there’s a tragic, mystifying beauty to the idea that we are alone in this world. From Perfidia Beverly Hills, the blazing revolutionary of One Battle After Another, to the mercilessly ambitious oil inspector Daniel Plainview of There Will Be Blood, sometimes, this solitude is self-manufactured, forged by fierce temperaments that push others away; create walls and locked doors for which the keys have been lost. Funny that Anderson is drawn to such individuals given several of his films’ populous ensembles, their intricately drawn networks of strange people, of which Magnolia (1999), his third feature, is perhaps the most sprawling. Near the beginning of the film, a montage set to Aimee Mann’s rendition of, “One is the Loneliest Number,” teases the film’s many narrative threads, introducing us to former trivia show prodigy Donnie (William H. Macy), volatile trophy wife Linda (Julianne Moore), and bumbling LAPD officer Jim (John C. Reilly), among others. In their struggles, each character is alone, Anderson seems to suggest, and yet the world—big and small as it is—has a way of bringing us together.

True, though Anderson puts a distinctly magical, cinematic, spin on this set-up, with Magnolia—which takes place in California’s San Fernando Valley, home to studios like Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures—distinguishing itself among his body of work as a film built on cosmic coincidences and freak happenings. In the prelude, an unseen narrator (Ricky Jay) recounts the bizarre details of three crimes, one of which, for instance, involves a man committing suicide by throwing himself off a building but dying because of a bullet wound from a gun fired from a lower floor. These circumstances are exceptional, and so are the people, for better or worse. Donnie, now an unemployed wretch with a hopeless crush on a brawny bartender with braces, may have been special as a kid, but now he’s special in much more unfortunate ways, having recently been struck by lightning.

Magnolia brings together several of Anderson’s previous performers from Hard Eight (1996) and Boogie Nights (1997), including Moore, Macy, Reilly, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Phil, the nurse to Linda’s dying husband, Earl (Jason Robards, who, in an echo of his character’s declining state, died of cancer in 2000, making Earl his final film role). The film’s cacophony of interconnected characters comes together, visually, via long tracking shots—Anderson’s signature—that organize complex scenarios into continuous streams of action, though Magnolia, as with Anderson’s other ’90s films, differs from his more recent output in its frenetic cadence and edgy dolly zooms that create an epic kind of suspense. The game show, which plays on several of the character’s televisions and was inspired by some of Anderson’s early gigs behind the scenes on similar programs, also functions as a narrative glue coated in spectacle. Earl is the program’s producer and Jimmy (Philip Baker Hall), who is also dying, is its host, and both, we find out, had abandoned and betrayed their children. The show’s name, “What Do Kids Know?” is therefore a fitting one for a film about bad dads and their parental failures; the sick, older men’s lurch toward death providing a last opportunity to, if not make amends, set the stage for catharsis.

Linda, a nervous wreck, and Jimmy’s daughter, Claudia (Melora Walters), a drug addict who finds herself courted by Officer Jim, hypnotize as twitchy, damaged women pinned under the weight of the men around them; likewise, Stanley (Jeremy Blackman), the whiz-kid on a winning streak in “What Do Kids Know?” seems destined to suffer the same fate as Donnie, whose father also exploited him and stole his winnings. Where does Tom Cruise’s Frank—a kind of men’s rights spokesperson in the vein of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate—fit into this world? Frank’s blatant misogyny, his belief in male aggression and violence as a force for domination that should be embraced, makes him something of a touchstone for Anderson’s understanding of masculinity authority and its discontents. Phantom Thread’s Reynolds Woodcock, refined as he may be, shares a fascist sensibility with Lieutenant Lockjaw of One Battle After Another, and Dirk Diggler of Boogie Nights yearns for love and power in the measure that he believes his enormous penis deserves. Frank disavows his past, in which his father ran away and he was forced to take care of his sick mother, making him a victim transformed by his scars into a villain. Earl is Frank’s father, and in the final scenes of Magnolia, they reunite on Earl’s deathbed, saving him from the terrible fate of dying alone. Here, Frank gives in to the vulnerability he spent a lifetime suppressing, a turn as unlikely (or inevitable?) as raining frogs.