Hey folks.... The following comes from a new spy called: The Down Low. And it is a very negative look at MAGNOLIA, the Paul Thomas Anderson film coming soon to theaters near all of us. The first buzz and reviews we got from Australia were quite positive... this one is not. Having read this script... and knowing the type of movie this is. I can say with the utmost confidence that there will be many people that hate this film. There will also be many that point at those people and call them idiots and doo doo heads. I don't know which side of the wall I'll be on. I do know, that the character that Tom Cruise plays, will be a geek fave along the lines of Tyler Durden or the Drill Sgt in Full Metal Jacket. His character is a dynamo of dialogue that... knowing Cruise is the one saying it... I have the utmost confidence in.
The following review by THE DOWN LOW has spoilers that include... what the last shot of the film is. I recommend... not reading this. Instead I'll encapsulate in a non-spoiler fashion what he says here. TDL thinks the performances in this film are very very strong but wasted in a flat movie. He makes parallels to NASHVILLE and SHORT CUTS, but prefers both those films and says they have far more resonance. He really liked HARD EIGHT... was mixed on BOOGIE NIGHTS and is negative on this one. He feels that it is a bit overlong and heavy handed. Is he right? Of course he is, for his views. I'm willing to bet this is one of those films that'll be argued about to the umpteenth degree. Remember... this review has SPOILERS... read only at your own risk....
To: Harry Knowles From: The Down Low Saw Magnolia the other night and I was sort of shocked by the thing. Paul Thomas Anderson is certainly a director to take seriously. His first film, Hard Eight, is a stark and pretty devastating character study about gambling addiction and human loneliness, great, understated performance from all involved - Samuel L. Jackson, John C. Really, Phillip Baker Hall even Gwyneth Paltrow - and made with a patience and seriousness that’s sort of unheard of in young filmmakers. I think it’s one of the really good American indies of the '90s . And then there was Boogie Nights, a stylistically impressive feat, obviously a reminder of early Scorsese. Yet with all its visual bravura, i found the a little soulless - the characters were really not worth caring about and the excitement of the film was so based on its soundtrack that I figured the film wasn't solid enough in script or story to stimulate us without all the disco sound manipulation. Yet it continued to prove that Anderson absolutely knew the conventions of major movie making - so i went to see Magnolia with high hopes.
Man, what a bummer of a film. It's three hour shapeless piece that offers a multiple of characters and plots that are mostly uninteresting. The film instantly recalls a couple of major works by Robert Altman - namely, Nashville and Short Cuts. Yet those films, which also present us with a vast look at multiples of characters and situations - are nuanced and urgent and clever in a way that Magnolia is not.
Magnolia seems to be about the damage parents can do to their children, about the way we love and live stems from the way we were raised. In the movie, every character is pretty messed up, they've either been the victims of parental abuse – either emotional and physical - or have offered up cruel abuse themselves. Yet all the characters we see - played by Jason Robards, John C. Reilly, Julianne Moore, Phillip Semour Hoffman, Tom Cruise, William H. Macy etc. - are so miserably sad and emotionally screwed up that it's really painful and miserable to "spend time with them," so to speak.
And the sadness that permeates the film is not an impressive feat like it is in say, Anderson's own Hard Eight ( a film that creates a mood of misery that actually gives the story appropriate weight and importance). Very little here is connected to anything else, everything makes sense in only arbitrary, unconnected ways. It's as if Anderson came up with his characters on a whim, gave them obvious background, and just threw them in his script, which itself seems to have been written without much narrative consideration. It must be said that part of the point of Magnolia is the randomness of life - it beats us over the head with its themes of coincidence. Yet still, Anderson doesn't look at coincidence in any meaningful way - he just offers up obvious themes - "things happen, he says. Other themes of the film, all of which are actually explained to us by various characters: "we must love," " we must be able to regret," " life is sad, but we must move on, " blah, blah, blah : it's all very heavy handed.
Magnolia plays like a shapeless, confused mosaic. Like in Anderson's other films, it's blanketed by music that is used to manipulate us greatly - but here the music is really annoying, the film’s score is a constant that always seems as if it's building to some big event that never happens.
Also, the LA based folk singer Aimee Mann's music is said to be an inspiration for the film, and her songs are heard throughout. Mann is a beautiful musician, but she's mis—served here. We hear her songs, but they're randomly placed ( the film is just so painfully uneven in every way) and it seems like a big stretch to correlate her lyrics to what's occurring on the screen. In one really misconceived scene all the characters - who are in different places - break out and sing over one of her songs - it's like a scene from a musical. Literally, we see Tom Cruise sitting in a car performing Karaoke style over a female folk song - and Jason Robards, who plays a man dying in bed - is singing the same song. In a more taut film, I could see this scene coming across as sort of magical, but here it just seems superfluous and really random.
Much of Magnolia is down right mean spirited, there's this whole game show subplot that has to do with an abused brilliant child . What's depicted here is just cruel, miserable to watch. It made me cringe.
As for the acting, it must be said that's it's all quite good. But the performances are wasted - they belong in a better movie. For example, Julianne Moore has like ten scenes in which she breaks out in repetitive tears and cries about how she just now has realized she loves her dying husband. And she creates a potent mood, but all i could think was "who the hell cares."
And what really sucks is that Tom Cruise gives a fantastic performance in this film: he plays this women hating crazy cult leader dude and he's blazing - he's as good as he's been in a long time. Rumored to have had only a cameo in the movie, he's actually on screen as much as anyone else is, but he's the most exciting and fully human (in a very weird way) character in the movie. I wish Anderson focused the whole film on him, as we keep waiting for him to return. But unfortunately, there's like 2 1/2 hours of melodramatic, pretentious nonsense that separates all of his scenes.
This will be the second attempt at an art film Cruise has made (after Eyes Wide Shut) – and it will be the second that’s a failure on some level. That’s too bad ( though deep pocketed movie dudes like Tom Cruise need no crying for) - because he's an underrated actor who wastes his time making big budget movies and it would be a great thing for creative filmmakers if he lent his power to art films. After this , I wouldn’t be surprised if he only made Mission Impossible movies.
It’s no surprise that Magnolia ends in a preposterous way – I’ll just say this, it features frogs falling from the sky. Anderson is saying that life is full of weird events and anything can happen – the only constant is the craziness of peoples’ emotions. Maybe in a movie that was confident of its tone, frogs falling from the sky would be the most creative ending imaginable, but in a movie that takes itself as immensely seriously as this one does – it’s just the final confused ingredient.
That’s the down low.
