Reviews

"Magnolia" was supposed to be my new favorite film. I had just watched "Crash" (2005) and "Shortcuts" (1993) and was looking for more 'hypertext cinema' movies. When I heard about this film and its "epic mosaic" of various Los Angeles characters, I couldn't wait to watch it. Now, I wish I could get my three hours back. This is one of the worst films I have ever seen.

One of the things I hated most about it was that the opening 30 minutes was amazingly great. It starts off epic and all goes downhill from there. We are shown three urban legends, followed by an introduction of all the characters set to Three Dog Night's "One". We see a game show host (Philip Baker Hall), a kid contestant (Jeremy Blackman), a former contestant now an adult (William H. Macy), a dying man (Jason Robards), his gold digging wife (Julianne Moore), his nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his estranged womanizing son (Tom Cruise), an LAPD officer (John C. Reilly), and the crack head he goes on a date with.

The story, you ask? There was no story. Just random people saying the f-word over and over again. At first it was just boring, but then it became painful to watch. It doesn't help that these are the dumbest characters I have ever seen. There wasn't a single action done by them that was realistic. From the kid who pees his pants instead of going to a bathroom, to the wife who barely reacts when she finds out her husband molested their daughter. None of the people were interesting and the film gave me no reason to care about them.

The last 20 minutes of the story goes from boring to completely absurd. The route Paul Thomas Anderson decides to go is way too gimmicky. Without giving too much away, he ended the movie in a way that had no point and proceeded to make the entire film pointless.

In the end, there was no closure. None of the characters connected in any noticeable way. Nobody ended up changing. I had so many questions that I could have filled up the entire discussion boards with them, if I cared enough to find out the answers, which I didn't. The message isn't even clear, which is a big problem if your film is supposed to be a 'message movie'. The best I can come up with is: "You can't change the past, so learn from it, no matter how bad you are". Mr. Anderson thinks he is so revolutionary, but it's the exact same moral as "The Lion King", except five times more cynical.

My film studies teacher once asked me what I thought of the "brilliant ending" (her words) and I responded: "I was still trying to figure out why Julianne Moore was cursing in the pharmacy earlier". This movie was two hours too long and far too unfocused, not to mentioned pretentious. Paul Thomas Anderson thinks he is so clever with his symbolic use of numbers, age-old twists, and shallow philosophy, even though they had been done before.

Was there anything redeeming about the movie? Well, the soundtrack by Aimee Mann was great, both her songs and the tracks by other artists, but it was so overbearing and out of place at times that I could barely make out the dialog. John C. Reilly's police officer character was good, but he kept making ridiculously stupid decisions over and over. I kept wondering if I would like to see any of the segments expanded into its own film, I couldn't think a single one that I would pay to see.

This is not a good film. This is an impostor of a film, something terrible masquerading as profound. I am a fan of 'alternate' movies and consider myself intelligent, so don't think that is the problem. I can almost bet that people who love this movie have no reason why they like it, they just do. Magnolia is a movie for cinema snobs who know everything about movies, except how to enjoy them. All in all, I want my money back and I didn't even pay to see it!