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.