Gator is the host of a TV show of a quiz for kids. He finds out he is dying from cancer and wants to reconcile with his estranged daughter, Claudia, but she rejects him, accusing him of molesting her... Police officer Jim arrives at Claudia's apartment due to complaints of neighbors for too loud noise. Jim and Claudia begin dating, but she leaves him because she is secretly taking drugs... The 12-year old Stanley helps his team score points at the TV quiz, but when he urinates in his underwear, he refuses to participate just as they were about to win... Earl is dying from cancer, bedridden, but asks his nurse to contact his estranged son Frank, a motivational speaker on how to seduce women. Frank reluctantly arrives to talk with Earl... Former quiz kid, the now grown up Donnie, wants to steal the money from the safe of his boss... During the night, it starts raining frogs, causing disbelief among people.
The only Paul Thomas Anderson film that Roger Ebert included in his list of Great Movies, "Magnolia" is an exhausting, but extremely ambitious hyper-ensemble drama with some 30 characters that juggles with numerous themes and works on several levels, of which Anderson himself said that it is his "best film, for better or worse". It is overburdened and excessive at times, yet the director has such a tight grip on everything that it all aligns into a meaningful point at the end, when all these random subplots are revealed to be connected in one way or another. The greatest performance was achieved by the excellent Jason Robards in his last role as the dying Earl, who fully acknowledges his mistakes and regrets them, wishing that he had a way to correct them. The whole movie is filled with unusual details, ideas, solutions and inovations: the opening presents two mysteries (a scuba diver is found on a tree because he died in a lake, was picked up by a firefighter plane which dumped the water over a fire in a forest; a man jumps from a building to commit suicide, but just as he was falling down, he was shot through a window by accident, so the police arrest the woman with the gun for murder), playing with the concept of extreme coincidences in the law of large numbers.
In one neat little sequence, a little kid raps the answer of the murder case to the police officer Jim, who doesn't even register it, while in another it presents something you will probably never see in any other film before this one, the one where officer Jim catches Donnie who stole money from the safe of his boss, they both agree it was a stupid idea, and then Jim allows Donnie to return the money and simply lets him go, because he understands him. In another, Gator laments that his estranged daughter Claudia accuses him of molesting her when she was a kid, and when his wife Rose asks him if this is true, he looks at her and says "I don't remember", in a moment that is tragic, bizarre and funny at the same time. Not all moments work, though. For instance, Tom Cruise's character of Frank, a motivational speaker who advises crowds of men how to seduce women, is the weakest link and misguided, since it is unclear why anybody would listen to such an obscure figure at all; whereas it is unconvincing that Linda (Julianne Moore), a woman who married the rich Earl only to get his money, would all of a sudden realize she loves him on his deathbed, since this tenderness between them is never shown in the film. "Magnolia" is something of a Pyrrhic victory: it did everything right, but its overambitious narrative reached a breaking point in the 3 hour long running time, causing Anderson to reach his limit and focus on smaller, different kind of stories for a change, since this format practically self-destructed itself as soon as it was finished.
Grade:+++
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