Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 1999, 108 minutes

Managing an ensemble cast is no simple feat when each character gets roughly as much screen time as the next. Audiences want to know who the hero is and what they’re rooting for. You also have to connect the characters through common themes to lock the stories together, or else you might as well make a whole bunch of films. Too many cooks can spoil this broth.

Magnolia pretty much says 'poppycock’ to all of this and does its own thing. Based on the melancholy lyrics of singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, the screenplay explores a number of family relationships, all tainted with regret and longing for resolution through forgiveness of some kind. These together with geographical location, are pretty much all there is to link everything together. Yet although Magnolia seems like a big messy tangle of hardship and bitterness, cohesion is found beneath the surface. It arises mostly through style and presentation, and director Paul Thomas Anderson has enough artistic energy to feed this behemoth without curtailing his ambition.

This is the clincher with Magnolia. While the acting is nigh-on perfect and the characters are well-written and realized, Magnolia impresses mainly because of its fired-up operatic style. As the weather conditions spiral out of control, the characters start to confront their demons, and the music and constant scene-flicking urge the stories to their unified climax.

Integral to the success of the film are Philip Seymour Hoffman as a warmhearted sensitive nurse and John C Reilly as a police officer with an astounding sense of pride and responsibility. Some performances are overdramatic, but they are supposed to be. Anderson has the reserves of intensity needed for the exaggerations to thrive, and the result is a self-assured opus of a movie.

Review by Robert Hayward
Written for EUFS Programme Autumn 2004