Paul Thomas Anderson made his name with the epic Boogie Nights. His new film, the equally epic Magnolia, gives one the feeling that he is trying to follow in the footsteps of the Robert Altman of multi-character, multi-storyline movies such as Nashville and Short Cuts. And he succeeds – Magnolia has to be the best Altman film in a while.
It is long (perhaps a little too long) and complex, weaving together the stories of a range of people living in the San Fernando Valley. There’s Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), dying of cancer; his young wife Linda (Julianne Moore); his nurse, Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffmann); there’s sexual evangelist Frank TJ Mackey (Tom Cruise); Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), presenter of the TV quiz show What Do Kids Know?; there’s Donnie Smith (William H Macy), former child star of that very show; and more. As the movie progresses, the links between the various characters emerge, and their different problems reach crisis point.
Magnolia is enthralling: few American directors are willing to try for movies on this scale, and few would get it right. That Anderson does so, and is able to give each of his characters a vital life of his or her own, is a sign of his immense storytelling skill as well as a feeling for character that has more in common with a 19th-century novelist than most of his Hollywood contemporaries.
He does not deal in clichés, but in the oddities and subtleties of the human psyche under pressure. Anderson apparently wanted to make something “small and intimate”, but his narrative and his characters ran away with him. Yet Magnolia still has an extraordinarily intimate feel.
The film’s theme is clear; it is articulated several times: “We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.” That is obvious enough; what makes it riveting is the way Anderson plays that thesis out in the stories he tells, contrasting the experiences of children and adults, exploring the conflicts of parents and their offspring.
Particularly apt and poignant is the figure of Donnie Smith, who has never been able to grow beyond his brief youthful fame as a child TV star. His backward-looking angst is juxtaposed against the present anxiety of Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), a more recent addition to What Do Kids Know?, and one who is already feeling the onerous burden of his television duties. Kids are forced to grow up too young, while adults are still dealing with their childhoods. In fact, adulthood and childhood exist simultaneously in us all.
Anderson makes superb use of a great cast, many of whom appeared in Boogie Nights (there is some fun to be had identifying them and recalling their roles in the earlier movie). One expects excellent, nuanced performances from the likes of Hoffmann, who is very moving as the nurse trying to fulfil his patient’s dying wish, or from John C Reilly, as a good-natured cop. What is more surprising is how good Cruise is as the ultra-macho leader of “Seduce and Destroy” workshops that aim to teach men to win the “battle of the bush” – and that’s not bush as in bundu.