Magnolia

I'm still kind of a noob in regards to Paul Thomas Anderson, who's generally considered the best out of our other modern Anderson's (Wes Anderson and Paul W.S. Anderson, not merging to create Paul T. Wes Anderson or something). But with the MoFo list challenges lingering and me ignoring them, I think it's time I finally freaking completed one. This is the longest of the few remaining movies on the 2010 Refresh of the site's top 100, and I have a day off. So, Magnolia it is.

Life has a lot of weird coincidences because life is connected. We see the many connections many people with their own problems can have through the eyes of the people who have very loose connections to a game show host dealing with cancer. People like him and even complete opposites are all seen in this largely realistic story where people end up going through absolute hell, and find themselves in one freak occurrence that affects everyone at the end.

This movie is loosely based on the songs of a singer/songwriter, which is an incredible thing to do when you think about it. We are dealing with one of the best examples of hyperlink storytelling here. Stories like Nashville are all about using human beings as personifications of very specific ingredients of the theme. In Nashville's case, it was a music scene in the titular city, and Altman rocked his ability to connect all the dots here. THIS TIME, however, this is a movie about one thing that we all know as human beings, not some specific thing that a director has to struggle capturing for a whole audience who'll include people who don't care about that scene. We don't have to worry about a music scene or anything, because this movie is about a subject that applies to everyone: life.

This is the American equivalent to China's incredible family drama Yi Yi. The themes of connections, life's random struggles, various kinds of morality and the desire for a clearer future are all here. The cast is putting every ounce of their being into these performances, and it pays off more well than they may have anticipated, because these characters are all feeling struggles that we're either familiar with or can understand because we've gone through something with common factors. For example, we have the cop that tries hard to be a stickler for the law, but his soft side slowly comes out throughout the movie as he starts a relationship with a pothead. This pothead is a relative to the host of a game show who's got cancer. We have an ex-contestant on a game show who's life has gone to shambles, and a current challenger who feels the weight of the world forced on him. Meanwhile, the ex-producer of the game show is also dying and has struggles with his wife and his lost son. This movie is about little bits and pieces of their lives all connected together in vague ways, but the emotions we feel for all these people are never put below fancy cinematography or special effects. Emotion, dialogue, realism, story. That seems to be the order for a while.

And then... it happens. The thing that happens. Because sometimes, all it takes is for you to be thrown off the course that you're taking for you to end up on the course you want to take: meaning. A reason to live, and a reason to continue. And even if you don't find meaning yet, or don't even know you're on that road, at least you ended up taking even one step onto the right path. Because life throws things at you, and that's the best possible reason for something that ridiculous to ever happen in a movie like this. There's no better way to force the concept of symbolism and life in your head by challenging the border of plausibility to end up in one great event that redefines everything.

This climactic scene, if you wanna call it that, shows some of the best and most artistic direction of the movie. It fully captures the emotions and sense of epica you could find in such an improbably situation, which is relying on that 0.1% possibility when you think about the storm, throughout most of the movie, and doesn't rewrite the movie's sense of melodrama in anyway, shape or form... no, it improves it by helping us to realize any one out of 100 things: things aren't always black and white, life throws things at you, there are worse things than what you're going through, etc. etc., Yul Brenner etc.

When I started Magnolia, I was hoping it would be an incredible experience that really captures the art of hyperlink. Hyperlink cinema is such a clunky thing to work with in many cases, most famously Crash 2004. But I knew there was a chance I would find it seriously overrated, as I do with some other movies like Le Samourai or The Conformist. I even find that, while it's great, There Will Be Blood is NOTHING compared to No Country for Old Men which came out the same year. Magnolia challenges both our perceptions of filmmaking and reality at the same time and keeps us constantly engrossed in characters with one or two sides at best, delivering a life experience that has never been captured on film before then. This is going in my current top 5.

= 100

Paul Thomas Anderson's Directorial Score (4 Good vs. 0 Bad)

Magnolia: 100
Inherent Vice: 100
There Will Be Blood: 97
Punch-Drunk Love: 89

Score: 96.5 / 4

Paul Thomas Anderson moves up on my Best Directors List from #35 up to #29 between Agnes Varda and Carl Dreyer.