2nd Favorite Movie - Magnolia

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

So I'm pretty glad that I've only got one more of these to do. While I used to look forward to writing about a new movie every week, lately I've had to work up the motivation to do even one entry a month. Last week Bethany asked me if I was going to blog on my day off and my response was, "I forgot we even had a blog." But talking about Magnolia does get my juices flowing. I can tell this is gonna be a long post.

Magnolia came out in theaters in 1999, in what has been called "the year that changed movies."
(http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,271806_7_0_,00.html)
During the year that served as the eve of the new millenium, an overabundance of spiritually and theologically rich films were released: The Matrix, Fight Club, Run Lola Run, American Beauty, Dogma, The Third Miracle, The Green Mile, The Big Kahuna, Keeping the Faith, The End of the Affair, and After Life. In my mind, Magnolia is the best and richest of them all.

The first time I saw Magnolia was on New Year's Day of 2001. I was living in Fresno at the time and my roommates and I had ordered it through Netflix. I woke up around 10 am, had the house to myself, popped the DVD in, and when it was done I rushed to my computer to find out everything I could about this movie that was unlike anything I had ever seen before. In the way that some people obsess about Star Wars or Star Trek, I developed an obsession for Magnolia. I trolled fan boards searching for Magnolia minutia (of which there is plenty - for example, the placement of 8's and 2's throughout the film and how many characters are named after flowers). I forced friends of mine who had not seen it to watch it with me. I downloaded the songs from the movie and listened to them over and over again. In a way that only a handful of movies in my entire lifetime will, this movie spoke to my very soul.

Magnolia boasts an impressive ensemble cast, many of who worked with director PT Anderson on his first hit, Boogie Nights: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly, and Luis Guzman. Joining them is Tom Cruise, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the leader of a male chauvinist seminar. Be warned -some of the foulest statements ever uttered by mankind come from the lips of his character in this film. But as we discover, there is a reason for his character saying the things he does and acting the way he does, and that is what the film is all about. A line from the movie is "we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." It just occured to me that Magnolia shares this theme with another obsession of mine, the TV show Lost. Interestingly, they also share a cast member: actress April Grace who plays an interviewer in Magnolia and the Other on Lost who Mikhail shot in the "Entering 77" episode.

The film toggles between the male chauvinist played by Cruise, a drug addict, a man on his deathbed and his emotionally unstable wife, a TV game show host with a secret life, a washed-up former child star on TV, and a single dad who cares about success more than he cares about his son's well-being. Within this world of absolute anguish, joy can be found in the presence of a few "angels" - Phillip Seymour Hoffman's tender loving nurse, John C. Reilly's incorruptible cop, and a little boy who, in one scene, is positioned so that the angelic wings from a background mural appear to be protruding from his back. While most of the characters have been used and abused by people in their past and continue to draw others into this cycle of despair, these three are able to rise above the filth and seek to draw others out of it.

The Aimee Mann songs "Wise Up" and "Save Me" which were written for the film are two of my favorite songs ever and I cannot hear them without thinking of the movie. This film would not be what it is without the inclusion of these two songs. "Wise Up" comes at the point in the film when people are beginning to realize the poor choices they have made and how it has hurt themselves and others - that perhaps there is still a chance for them to "Wise Up" and redeem their broken lives. In just one of the bold moves that PT Anderson makes, he has the various actors stop what they have been doing in the film and actually sing the song out loud in their regular voices. It is somewhat like what you would see in a musical, but here they actually look directly into the camera, breaking the storied "fourth wall" of cinema and reminding the viewer that they are watching a movie and the people on screen are acting. For some critics, this was ridiculous. For me, in a film as big and bold as Magnolia, it works. Especially since until this point, for about 2.5 hours, there really is not much of an opportunity to ever stop and catch your breath. For a film with so much dialogue and not much "action", Magnolia builds a tremendous amount of tension. As director PT Anderson says, "I tried to structure my movie after (the Beatles' song) 'A Day in the Life,' how it would sort of build build build build build build build--fall off a cliff, and then start building back up again. I took more structurally from that song than from any movie I've seen." The "Wise Up" interlude provides a release of tension to viewers before the grand finale, which is an even bigger and bolder decision by PT Anderson.

The same people who have a problem with characters spontaneously bursting into song probably also have a problem with the random act of God/nature that takes place at the end of the film, but it is set up beautifully in the film's prologue about how some events in life seem to be orchestrated by a higher power. When we are desparate for help and circumstances become worked out in a perfect and incredible way, divine providence can feel like a more plausible answer than coincidence. For example, in the days leading up to our Winter Retreat last weekend, http://www.weather.com/ called for a 100% chance of rain (have you EVER seen that before?) on Friday, 90% on Saturday, and 60% on Sunday. Friday it poured like crazy. Sunday it poured like crazy. Saturday, we actually had blue skies, sunshine, and not a drop of rain. And that was the key day for us where we were outside for paintball, the ropes course, a night game, and "muggle quidditch" (ask me if you want to know more, it was awesome!). Coincidence or divine providence? I'm not a big "God orchestrated the weather in this whole region just for our group of 50 people" kind of guy, but it was pretty amazing. The other Aimee Mann song, "Save Me" comes at the end of the movie when a drug addicted, promiscous character has for once in her life found something pure, good and noble, and for the first time in the film actually smiles.

If you have made it this far, I want to mention that Bethany and I checked out PT Anderson's latest film, There Will Be Blood last weekend. We were watching the Super Bowl and with the score being only 7-3 in the 3rd quarter, we were getting bored and decided to go see a movie. The game started to pick up just as we were leaving, but we still figured there was no way "weak old Eli" could win a Super Bowl and Tom "the next Joe Montana" Brady could lose one. Our jaws dropped when we came home that night and watched the highlights on Sportscenter. Anyways, neither of us was all that impressed with There Will Be Blood. While all of PT Anderson's films could be considered bizarre and over-the-top, for some reason it bothered me in this film. I still thinkDaniel Day Lewis will get Best Actor, and probably deservedly so, but I think No Country for Old Men, which I liked a bit more, will take most of the major awards. Both films, however, lost me in the last 20 minutes and neither one's "knockout punch last scene", did anything for me. With the writer's strike looking like it will end in the next couple of days, I look forward to the Academy Awards on February 24. But I am growing jaded with the Academy. I don't understand how Gone Baby Gone, 3:10 to Yuma, and especially Into the Wild did not get more nominations, while a PT Anderson and Coen brothers' film that are inferior to their previous work could get so many. It has got to the point where the Academy members nominate and vote based on their previous mistakes: "What? We snubbed Martin Scorsese for Goodfellas and Raging Bull? Well, let's make up for it and give him the Oscar for The Departed, which isn't even one of his 5 best films." Or "Denzel Washington doesn't have a Best Actor Oscar yet? Let's vote him in for Training Day, since we messed up back in 1993 with Malcolm X." With this being the case, perhaps we will see a win for PT Anderson and There Will Be Blood, since Magnolia - the best film of 1999 - was shut out at the Academy Awards that year.