50 Days 50 Films - #19 "Magnolia" (Paul Thomas Anderson)

If I had been compiling this list six months ago, "Magnolia" would have been nowhere near it.

In fact, I would have told you it was one of Anderson's weakest films. I would have said it was a self-important catastrophe.

Then I rewatched it after Philip Seymour Hoffman died. And holy shit.

Keep in mind, I saw this film once, right after it went to video back in 1999 or 2000. This was at the tail-end of that glorious 90s indie boom. Anderson was supposed to be THE NEXT BIG THING. Pretty much the only thing anybody had seen from him to that point was "Boogie Nights" (I wouldn't catch up with his first film, 1996's "Hard Eight," until a few years later). All us movie geeks were on pins and needles to see what he would come up with next.

What we got was "Magnolia." And it was definitely a film that left many of us scratching our heads.

I think I had also just read "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," Peter Biskind's superlative chronicle of 70s New Hollywood cinema and the arrogance and excess that  brought the movement down. In it, I saw dark portents for the future of the 90s scene. At the time "Magnolia" seemed to confirm my worst fears. Like Friedkin's "Sorcerer" and Coppola's "One From The Heart" before it, "Magnolia" seemed to be a bloated, pretentious mess, an unfortunate misstep from a promising young filmmaker who was given way too much way too soon.

In retrospect, I think I wanted this to be "Boogie Nights 2." That sort of expectation tripped up Tarantino in my eyes, too, when he followed "Pulp Fiction" with "Jackie Brown." I was equally soft on that film when it came out, and I've have since gone back to re-appraise it as maybe Tarantino's best work.

The experience of rewatching "Magnolia" a few months ago was profound. Now, armed with the knowledge of where Anderson would take his career over the following decade with films like "There Will Be Blood" and "The Master," "Magnolia" seems to be completely of a piece with his larger vision.

It IS a mess. A gloriously ambitious, unhinged mess. In the best possible way.

Does it all work? Absolutely not. But, damn if Anderson isn't willing to just put it all out there on the line. This is what I love about his films. They're shaggy and unwieldy things, lumbering across the screen, overstuffed with about sixteen too many ideas and brimming with a lunatic energy unlike anything else in contemporary American cinema. They shouldn't work. But they do.

Somehow, through it all, he manages to tie everything together in an emotionally rich if narratively untethered way. If you can get on his films' wavelength, they'll do some crazy shit to your brain and your heart.

I remember groaning at the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Aimee Mann singalong that serves as the film's crisis point. I distinctly remember thinking "wait, what the fuck is this shit?"

This time, the scene left me speechless and in absolute awe, with a surprised lump in my throat. It's such an unexpected, left-field turn and, like so much in his films, it absolutely should not work. And yet, it does. If you let it.

Fundamentally, this is a film driven by big themes — family, grief, letting go — but anchored by some truly astounding, nuanced character work, both in the script and the performances. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore are particularly stunning, but for my money the most compelling performance comes from Philip Baker Hall, who manages to find all sorts of unexpected emotional nooks in crannies in a character that, for him, could have been pretty stock.

I still have no idea what the rain of frogs is about, but I don't care. Rather than portend the end of the 90s indie boom, I feel like "Magnolia" was its last true moment of greatness.