Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” opens with a bravura, show-stopping six-minute prologue that unfolds through three short stories, each built on seemingly impossible coincidences. There’s the man murdered in Greenberry Hill, London, by three men named Green, Berry and Hill; a scuba diver mistakenly scooped out of a lake by a firefighting plane had gotten into a fight with the pilot two days earlier; and a teenager’s suicide jump off his apartment roof was foiled by a safety net, only for his mother to accidentally shoot him through the window on his way down.
Anderson illustrates all of it with freeze frames and diagrams drawn right onto the screen NFL-broadcast style with X’s and O’s. It’s sketched over the chaos of real life, just like a coach breaking down the most absurd plays in history. It announces the film’s central argument before a single main character appears — improbable, unexplainable things happen.
The three hours are , somehow, all of the following at once: a game show drama, a cop movie, a story about a man who desperately wants braces, a deathbed confession, a break-in, a love story. Nine storylines. One day in the Valley.
About two hours in, just when you think you have a handle on the movie, every character stops what they’re doing and sings along to the same Aimee Mann song. Not a musical. Magnolia.
The film is grand in scope yet devastatingly intimate: the landscape of a human face looking into another is all Anderson needs to create rivers and valleys of emotion. The camera finds something miraculous in ordinary people at the ends of their ropes, and it holds there, unflinching, until you feel it too.
The ensemble weaves individual lives into one web of connected stories. It’s a stacked cast, wall-to-wall: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, William H. Macy. Then there’s Tom Cruise, who at the time was making 15–20 million dollars a picture, but took just $100,000 to be in this movie. That same year, he made $20 million for Eyes Wide Shut. The man left $19.9 million on the table, and he’s never been better on screen. That’s the kind of film Magnolia is — the kind that makes one of the biggest movie stars on the planet say, “I don’t care what you’re paying me, I just need to be part of this.”
And then, I won’t say what happens, but Anderson commits completely, and you will either laugh, cry or sit in stunned silence. Maybe all three. Probably all three. Magnolia is a film about people desperately trying to connect — with their pasts, with each other, with something larger than themselves. It’s messy and operatic and alive in a way that most movies simply aren’t. You may disagree. But it did happen.
