the eXile - Krazy Kevin's Kino Korner

Issue #07/88, April 13 - 27, 2000

By Krazy Kino Kevin McElwee

I'm at a loss where to begin with MAGNOLIA, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's follow-up to the wildly successful Boogie Nights. To state the obvious, that Magnolia is an even worse film than its predecessor (which itself was a significantly worse film than Anderson's debut, the flimsy but not altogether horrid Hard Eight), implies that Boogie Nights was not already seemingly as bad as it gets. And yet it's true: Anderson has somehow found a way to create something more pointlessly meandering and less watchable than his porn industry chronicle. Don't ask me how he did it - he just did.

According to my pet theory that it's equally difficult to achieve absolute badness as absolute greatness, the negative triumph that is Magnolia ought to be worth at least a few critical points. In Anderson's case, however,

I'm loathe to dole out the credit, primarily out of concern for the films his inexplicable "wunderkind" status will permit him to make in the future. Even those critics who panned Magnolia (almost all of them, actually) fell all over themselves tagging it as an ambitious failure by a young director of practically infinite promise. There's no denying that Anderson's ambitiousness has increased measurably with each successive film, but then so has his ineptitude, in almost perfect step with the former. While the 101-minute Hard Eight could have actually used some more time to flesh out its rather straightforward criminal-character study and Boogie Nights was at least a half hour overweight at 155 minutes, Magnolia boldly surpasses the 3-hour mark and is a total disaster almost from the start. (The opening segment, in which a series of seemingly impossible "real life" coincidences are presented by a voice-over narrative, is engaging in itself - although its connection to the subsequent material it supposedly serves to introduce is dubious at best.) How anyone could interpret "development" of this kind as promising is beyond me.

Magnolia finds Anderson still entrenched in his native San Fernando Valley, but this time with a slightly expanded range of characters to approximate some underdeveloped LA microcosm (just two Negroes and still no Asians somehow) along the lines of Short Cuts or Grand Canyon. Conversely, he has restricted himself temporarily, employing the age-old trick of framing the action within a single day (with copious flashbacks, however). The Classical unity-of-time implications thereof are obvious; their purpose here is anything but.

Mostly, Anderson appears content simply to depict "his" LA in the manner of the city's most overused modifier: sprawling. Gradually encompassing an ever greater range of characters, all somehow connected in some way, the film's path ultimately resembles that of a disoriented driver on the city's freeways - exiting at random just long enough for a quick look around some neighborhood, then quickly returning to the freeway to travel to the next non-destination. In reality, LA County does actually have its share of neighborhoods that are worth more than just a tourist's once-over, but alas, the same cannot be said for the scenes in this movie. On this account at least, the viewer should be thankful for Anderson's rambling, short-attention-span narrative technique.

Given what it has to work with, the ensemble cast (including most of the Anderson regulars) does a more or less commendable job. Not that I get any pleasure in seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman and William H. Macy both wasted in yet another crap film. And frankly, there wasn't really anything Julianne Moore could do with the shrill, shrieking one-note psycho-bitch role she's given here. I can see how John C. Reilly's recurring bumbling dufus character might strike a chord with castrated post-90s American males, but it's not something that I necessarily want to see on a movie screen. Now this Philip Baker Hall guy is one I really don't get: you say understated professionalism; I say flat as a pancake with no butter or syrup on the side.

Tom Cruise's role, on the other hand, is just another ego-stroker (popular among aging short-statured ex-studboy types who are commonly perceived as homosexual by the entertainment media) meant to fabricate some serious acting credentials but which unintentionally serves to reinforce what most people have known all along: that Tom's two-dimensional appearance on screen is not an optical illusion. In fact, you should do your best to ignore his scenes to the extent possible - if his infomercial-derived male empowerment techniques don't annoy you, then the simplistic psychological explanation of their origins certainly will.

Perhaps some of you are sensing in the high density of three-named actors among the Anderson regulars a conspiracy of sorts - either in homage to the director's own three-name status or perhaps for some more dastardly purposes. I once harbored similar suspicions myself, but the more likely explanation is that the simpler two-name variants had already been taken by the time these actors joined the Screen Actors Guild (which permits no duplicate names among active members). They're all pretty damn whitebread, after all. (For a much more interesting tale on a similar subject, I invite you all to do some research into the origin of Michael J. Fox's stage-name middle initial. Hint: His real middle name is "Andrew.")

What's most perplexing about this whole Magnolia mess is the unqualified acclaim it has received from a seemingly random variety of sources. The dipshit Kino guy from Afisha referred to it as "not only the best film of the year, but the first with which we enter into a [brave] new era of quality cinema" - but then again, he's always pulling shit like that out of his ass. Any number of commentators have also singled out the film as somehow special, frequently in non-cinematic contexts. Oddest of all was the mention a few months back by Russia e-mail list guru David Johnson, who uncharacteristically (which even he noted at the time) went off-topic in his usually terse introductory note to praise the film's originality and god knows what else. Either the combined pressure of the War in Chechnya and the presidential campaign simply took its toll, or else David has a friend or relative who was involved in the production.

Since I really want to urge you (in fact, I cannot urge you fortement enough) not to see Magnolia, I'm going to commit a real critical faux pas here and reveal the freak surprise ending. You see, just as all of the little plots are merging together and hitting their respective climaxes (possibly it's supposed to be a collective climax; I'm not really sure), a shitload (i.e., definitely thousands, and perhaps millions or even billions) of frogs rains down on the entire LA basin - wreaking mid-level destruction, assisting Dr. Kervorkian-like in the suicide of at least one no-longer-necessary character, and generally putting everything into stark perspective in a Point Break 50-year-storm kind of way. If for some reason you really need to see a Biblical plague outside of THE BIBLE itself, you'd be much better off picking up a copy of Mike Davis's City of Quartz. Even if it is composed largely of exaggeration (if not outright bullshit), at least it makes for a fairly entertaining read.

In closing, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to both Daves for their bravely researched input, without which this Kino Korner would not have been possible - and I might very well have had to leave the house on Sunday evening.

P.S. AMERICAN BEAUTY still sucks (mostly). Now it has the five Academy Awards to prove it.

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