Saturday, March 1, 2008

Magnolia: The Movie Where Paul Thomas Anderson Got It Wrong

In the wake of the smashing success of There Will Be Blood, many people have decided to start writing P. T. Anderson's hagiography. Not so fast! Anderson certainly has the capability of making great films, but he also has the capability of making terrible films. One of these (really, the most egregious of these) is his film Magnolia, better known as the movie where Tom Cruise plays the sex guy based on Neil Strauss, author of the famous (infamous, really) book The Game, which is basically about finding sneaky ways to fuck women. Anyway, here's my take on the aforementioned motion picture.

In the motion picture Magnolia, Tom Cruise plays a sex guru by the name of Frank Mackey. It is one of Cruise's all-time best performances, and it is often surprising just how much Cruise dedicates himself to the role. Boundless self-confidence, outsized personality, rugged charisma--the character is unforgettable. In the film, we first hear his self-mythologizing take on himself while he is talking to a reporter: he talks about how his father is dead, how he keeps close to his mother, who is alleged to support his activities. As it turns out, the converse is true: Mackey's father is alive but not well, his mother is long dead of ovarian cancer. His father abandoned him many years earlier, and when the reporter brings this information up in the context of the interview, Mackey gets angry, then sulks like, if you'll pardon the expression, a little girl. He sits silently until the interview ends.

The scene is compelling, until you realize something: it's complete, utter bullshit. Bull. Shit. The psychology makes no intuitive sense: why would a man whose father walked out on him, who was raised by a single mother with, I believe, a few sisters, wind up becoming an overt misogynist and champion of the exploitation of women, fond of blurting out chauvinistic nonsense like, "Respect the Cock! Tame the Cunt!" without seeming ridiculous? It is, actually, quite ridiculous. And this is the central problem with Magnolia--despite impressive production values and incredible acting, virtually nothing in the movie makes much sense, and virtually nothing shares much of a resemblance to anything that might map onto the real world. Hardly any of the characters are recognizable as human beings, few are sympathetic, and we get to understand the inner lives of, well, none, aside from perhaps the moral-but-inept cop played by John C. Reilly. Him we get, and that's not nothing. But it's not enough in a three-plus hour film that demands intense audience concentration but rewards it not at all through a two-and-a-half-hour-long second act, followed by a nonsensical denouement that is so unbelievably stupid and anticlimactic, and ended by a postscript that wraps everything up as neatly as imaginable, dispenses a little "everybody's OK" bullshit, then mercifully ends to Aimee Mann's "Save Me", a very good song in search of a better movie.

But another interesting aspect that proves a different point in Anderson's turkey is a child abuse scandal. Philip Baker Hall plays an elderly, not at all library cop-like game show host with a tortured relationship with his daughter and, recently, terminal cancer. Right before the film's "climax" Hall's character is speaking with his (presumably long-suffering) wife. It gets heated. She asks him if he ever abused their daughter sexually. It's a tense scene. His rebuttal is, "I don't remember." Really? I find it hard to believe that somebody who fucked his own daughter would not remember that, and innocent men don't say that they don't remember. The wife, creditably, figures he's bullshitting and splits. He decides to try to kill himself. But he never actually admits anything! Is it true, can he not live in the penumbra of shame not knowing if it's true? Now, admittedly, illuminating the inner lives of people is more the purview of novels than of films. It's difficult to get grief and angst and whatever else, ennui across on the screen. Surely, though, it's not too much to ask that we be given some context for a character's actions? But then again, who gives a damn, there are giant frogs falling from the sky!

Yeah, that happens as well in this movie. No shit. Giant frogs, like some sort of biblical plague sent down by God to deliver P. T. Anderson from his boxed-in screenplay! It dovetails with the first scene in the movie, in which three Ripley's Believe It Or Not-style stories are relayed by narrator Ricky Jay. It's a pretty kick-ass way to open the movie, and one expects lots of crazy coincidences and such. The movie, unfortunately, delivers merely a bunch of contrivances and unrealistic characters. It is the climax, though, that takes the cake for the stupidest fucking thing I've ever seen in a movie. Giant frogs start falling from the sky. Why? We do not know. We are not meant to know. We are meant to merely believe. Believe in people who stubbornly refuse to act like people. Believe that a random group of people, geographically distributed all throughout Los Angeles, of all walks of life and backgrounds and presumably different tastes in music would all happen to be singing the same song at the same time. Now, I'll admit the possibility that the movie is trying to make some sort of statement about how unrealistic movies are, but I don't think that the best way to make that point is by making an incredibly un-self aware and unrealistic movie where much the action just doesn't make any sense. After a three-plus hour investment--most of which is just rising, gut-churning tension with no release--to have a filmmaker just yank a viewer's chain like that turns the proceedings into a mockery. No wonder the film bombed.

We see, time and again, in this movie a sincere urge to show us something we've never seen before, and that's admirable. But, ultimately, that's not that hard to do if you don't make any attempt to actually ground it in reality. And the film's central conceit--you know, how all of the characters' lives are, like, linked together and shit--was done far better in Robert Altman's masterpiece Short Cuts. Altman's film was also a fairly loose look at a bunch of Los Angelinos who did generally terrible things (and it also had Julianne Moore in it!) but Altman's film was full of poignant, painful observations about how people interact with one another. That's why it was a great film. Neither Magnolia nor Short Cuts are message movies, they aren't about something and that comes with good and bad. If you're not going to be about something, though, you at least need to make damn sure that you get the human element right. That's an imperative, and Anderson screwed that up. No wonder the movie blows more than a wind carrying the morning dew of tadpoles after a nice, cleansing evening rain of frogs.

In the end, what we see in this movie is a film that tries to wring the maximum emotional effect out of its material, but it is material that evinces little knowledge of man as he actually is, or for that matter woman as she actually is, and that cannot help but expose its own bankruptcy of imagination with a denouement that comes second only to "it was only a dream!" Anderson's other films have their merits and demerits, but this work shows a second-rate intellect feeling his way through earnest melodrama (and I mean that in the most pejorative way imaginable). Was it a blip or the indicator of deeper flaws in the director himself? H. L. Mencken once explained Beethoven's great art as having been the inevitable output of a man who had within him the temperament, emotion, and intellect of a god, and that great artists who have such exalted inner lives cannot help but produce brilliant art--it radiates through them. I don't mean to be flip, but based on the evidence I've seen, this description does not exactly fit Mr. Anderson.