Paul Thomas Anderson’s three-hour opus Magnolia isn’t as polished as his latest film and suffers from an overuse of profanity, but no other film I’ve seen reaches me as deeply on so many levels. I’m generally an overly abstract, crusty-hearted fellow with about as much empathy in my soul as fat cells in my body, and so I’m usually roused more by heavily intellectual tales than by heavily dramatic stories, but Magnolia appeals to my head and my heart in a way like no others. It’s not the most philosophically sophisticated or emotionally exhausting film I’ve seen, but it contains such a near-perfect walloping synthesis of theme and action that each viewing leaves me in an intense state of wonderment.Magnolia follows the narrative structure of interweaving multiple stories that at first glance appear not to relate but, as the film progresses, touch one another in ways large and small. There is the story of a dying man and his caretaker, a lonely, good-natured cop given an opportunity to connect with someone in need, a misogynistic motivational speaker who trains men to abuse women, a young wife of an old man torn by guilt over her infidelities, a grown former quiz kid psychologically broken by his parents, a child protégé facing a similar fate, a game show host dying of cancer, and his adult daughter whom he may have abused years ago.
No one better captures the effects of sin than Paul Thomas Anderson, and contrapasso is certainly a theme here as it is in his most recent film, There Will Be Blood, but where Blood ends in hell on earth, Magnolia looks to the future with hope. Unlike the 2007 movie bearing the name, Magnolia really is about atonement. Anderson, I’ve read, described his movie as a confession in the religious sense of the word.
Stories dealing with religious themes run the risk of becoming religious propaganda. Magnolia deals with religious themes, and it even has a scene of divine intervention that well-deserves the adjective “biblical,” but it avoids the risk of losing its narrative function by keeping God a possibility and a mystery rather than a plot-proven or empirically-proven fact. Anderson keeps the door open to the possibility that the biblical scene has no religious significance, that it is, in the words of the child protégé, “just something that happens,” but he also peppers his movie with traces and hints that the scene in question should be interpreted as a religious event. The reoccurring weather forecast, particularly the final “Skies clearing” forecasted before Los Angeles is visited by an event straight out of Exodus, puts the natural explanation in doubt.
I don’t recommend Magnolia to everyone. It’s a hard film of horrid, miserable people enslaved to their vices who are trying desperately to free themselves from their misery. Anderson shows that sometimes there’s a reason for the misery, and though his characters may not find much freedom from it, misery isn’t the last word.