With Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson establishes himself as one of the most exciting and distinctive directors around.
His new film contains the convulsive emotional hurt and sweeping visual style that characterised Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, and is an anthology of broken lives - each interleaving with the other in a lattice of ill omen and disquiet. It is an ensemble picture like Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or Altman's Short Cuts but, with the device of a deadpan prologue about the nature of coincidence, makes manifest the curious nature of its own very individual world. It is an excursion into the universe of Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not urban myth that prepares us - just about - for the uproarious biblical finale with which Anderson spectacularly discharges the unbearable tension and anxiety which has built up over the preceding three hours.
Among the characters are Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), a wealthy television producer, very ill and breathing his last: grouchy, unpleasant, in a lot of pain and profoundly unreconciled to his impending death. He is attended by Phil, a male nurse played by Philip Seymour Hoffman - an actor whose name on the billboard always demands attention. As it happens, this is a reserved and almost reticent performance by Hoffman, who is the only character not eaten up with angst and self-doubt.
Earl is also attended by his young wife, Linda, played with raw anger and self-loathing by Julianne Moore. Linda is experiencing a horrifying emotional about-face in her relations with Earl: she married him, lovelessly, for money but now realises she has actually fallen in love with him. She has been surprised, not by joy, but by the most terrible anguish.
Earl produced a long-running TV general knowledge quiz show of stupendous awfulness called What Do Kids Know?, which pits a team of grown-ups against kid prodigies and is an inspired metaphor for the inter-generational incomprehension and rancour that pervades the film. The quizmaster himself is Jimmy Gator, played by the incomparable Philip Baker Hall, whose face has solidified like lumps and rivulets of molten lava into the weary face he now presents to the world: wrecked and ruined and haggard (there is actually a clever sequence showing the show's gestation, and showing Gator getting older), and grotesquely inappropriate to the icky, perky little catchphrases the show has accumulated over the years.
Perhaps the outstanding performance is Tom Cruise as Earl's estranged son, the deliciously slimy Frank Mackey, a "motivational speaker" who runs a series of sex-advice seminars which are simply Nuremberg rallies for single guys. Entitled Seduce and Destroy, his sales pitch is a misogynist demagoguery, with individual lessons on "How to Turn That 'Friend' Into a Sperm Receptacle" and his message is that women must be subjected and humiliated before they do it to you, and that all sexual relations must be put on a permanent war footing.
With the slogan "Respect the Cock and Tame the Cunt", Cruise is a mixture of Hugh Hefner, Billy Graham and Adolf Hitler, and this strutting, ranting creation is something to put alongside the brutish Chad in Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men or Matthew Broderick's nice teacher Mr McAllister in Alexander Payne's Election. Once again, it shows that in American cinema and culture, sexual relations have, in a sense, become the new cold war. (Frank is evidently a magnification of real life sex hucksters, but it cannot be long before someone starts Seduce and Destroy for real. I suggest Paul Thomas Anderson copyrights and suppresses the whole horribly catchy idea the way anti-racist groups have bagged "hate.com".)
The poetic keynote to the film comes from Earl's grizzled death-bed lament about "the goddam regret". Don't be afraid to regret, he says, "use that regret any way you want." Magnolia is a dark and bitter poetry of regret, enunciated in a theatre of regret, in the grammar of regret, and clothed in the style and rhetoric of regret. It is a great wail of regret, with the terrible admission that real lives can be played out in a drama of anguish and waste, and that looking this full in the face at the end requires existential courage of the sort few of us have.
Magnolia is a sprawling, howling miasma of strangeness, and some may find incontinence and indiscipline in its sheer length and Anderson's love of bringing the soundtrack up to ear-bashing levels over the dialogue - particularly in the opening 10 to 15 minutes. But there is a compelling darkness in Anderson's film, a Mood Indigo of desperation.
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