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title: MAGNOLIA
studio: New Line Home Video MPAA rating: R starring: Jason Robards, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall, Tom Cruise, John C. Reilly, Melora Walters, Melinda Dillon, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeremy Blackman, Michael Bowen, Emmanuel Johnson release year film rating: Four and a half stars reviewed by: Bill warren
The swirling stories of the awesomely ambitious "Magnolia" again invited comparisons to the movies of Robert Altman, unlike Altman, Anderson views all his characters as fellow voyagers in life, all looking for love and/or acceptance, few finding it.
All three of Anderson's movies so far (the other is "Hard Eight") deal with the relationships between fathers or father figures and their children. To this recurring theme of Anderson's, "Magnolia" adds the frequently-stated idea that while we may be through with the past, it's not through with us: we are the sum of our pasts, and it's better if we face that and get on with life. (Anderson, incidentally, insists that "Magnolia" does not have several storylines, but rather is one big story with many characters.)
Anderson deals with his characters with great clarity, authority and honesty. And he keeps surprising us all the way through the long (three hours plus) movie, sometimes with astonishing camera techniques, sometimes with story twists, and finally with one of the most flabbergasting, outrageous, incredible and gruesomely delightful sequences in recent movie history. It simply wouldn't be fair to tell you what it is, but maybe you can get a hint from the fact that one of the people thanked in the end credits is Charles Fort.The movie opens with a few demonstrations of coincidences from the past, all of which seem to have been invented by Anderson. The unidentified narrator scoffs at the idea of coincidence, and we move into the interlinked stories, a "mosaic," as the presskit says. | |
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