Magnolia Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Your Typical Three-Hour Flying Frog Film

Magnolia

First, Magnolia, the new offering of Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights) is not about the south. Southerners might feel at home, however, since the film seems like a crowded family reunion, where no one knows all the connections.

Let’s see where to begin. There are two dying men (Jason Robards and Philip Baker Hall, in his fourth film of 1999) both of whom confess that they have committed adultery. One (Hall) has a fiercely angry, cocaine-addicted daughter (Melora Walters) who tries to resist the charms of a bumbling policeman (John C. Reilly) who shows up at her door in response to a complaint about the noise coming from her apartment. The other dying man (Robards) has a beautiful young wife (Julianne Moore, in her fifth film of 1999) and a devoted nurse (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in his third), who helps him get in touch with his estranged son (Tom Cruise), a sleazy infomercial guru who teaches men how to "Seduce and Destroy." An insufferable game show produces two generations of scarred young winners. One (Jeremy Blackman) cracks up on the air, while another (William H. Macy), grown in years but not in wisdom, cannot hold a job or sustain a relationship.

This is a three-hour wallow in human misery neither enriched by profundity nor lightened by humor. It’s like that rabbit that just keeps on going and going. And where it goes, you sometimes will not believe. At one point, we get quick flashes of the main characters, some of whom hardly seem capable of breathing, singing a doleful dirge by Aimee Mann, whose music provides an appropriately dreary background to the film.

Wait, it ain’t over till the fat frog splatters. There is a lot of complaining about reviewers giving away key details and surprise endings, spoiling a film’s effect. I’ve been careful to avoid such unwanted revelations in my reviews, but for Magnolia, here goes. The climax of the film is… I almost hate to say it… a rain of frogs over Los Angeles. We’re not talking about a demure toad-let here or there; we are talking serious biology-class specimens, splattering in such numbers that cars run off the road, sliding on crushed amphibians. The former whiz kid (Macy) happens to be climbing a utility pole, (isn't that what former whiz kids spend a lot of time doing?) looks up, just in time to catch a frog in the face, knocking him off the pole.

There are memorable moments. There are fantastic performances. Just not enough to sustain these three hours. The film begins with a heavy-handed little documentary on coincidence, and assumedly, the film is a discourse upon the topic. Discourse can get in the way of movie-making, however, with characters relieving themselves of verbal excess rather than emotionally connecting, and a movie this diffuse, needs all the connections it can get.

If you are tempted to see this film, you need to know that the language is crude. That does not bother me, if the crudity is necessary. But, after two scenes in which every other word was the same tired old obscenity, someone in the row behind me said, "Don’t they know any other word?" During Cruise’s viciously graphic lectures on what men really should do to women, I saw two couples leave the theater. There’s a problem there. The real nastiness of the speech—as much for its violence and depersonalization as for its obscenity—is part of the characterization. I’m sure that no one involved with this project endorses the character’s views.

Enough of this! I suggest you save your money, and snoop around on the Internet tonight. You can learn about levitating frog embryos, thanks to Brown University. And, instead of an absurd scene of falling frogs, there is something we need to worry about, and that is falling amphibian populations, which you can learn about in "The Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force (DAPTF) Home Pages."

Keep your feet dry (don’t step on any unexpected critters) and your heart full of noble thoughts. Truthfully, noble thoughts are few in this film, so make your own choices.