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MAGNOLIA |
New Line Cinema
presents a JoAnne Sellar/ Ghoulardi Film
production of a PT Anderson picture.
Prod: Paul Thomas Anderson, JoAnne Sellar; Co-prod: Daniel Lupi; Exec prod: Michael De Luca, Lynn Harris; Dir/Scr: Paul Thomas Anderson; Ph: Robert Elswit; Prod des: Mark Bridges, William Arnold; Cost des: Mark Bridges; Ed: Dylan Tichenor; Mus: Jon Brion; Songs: Aimee Mann.
With Jeremy Blackman (Stanley Spector), Michael Bowen (Rick Spector), Tom Cruise (Frank TJ Mackey), Melinda Dillon (Rose Gator), April Grace (Gwenovier), Philip Baker Hall (Jimmy Gator), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Phil Parma), Emmanuel Johnson (Dixon), William H Macy (Donnie Smith), Julianne Moore (Linda Partridge), John C Reilly (Officer Jim Kurring), Jason Robards (Earl Partridge), Melora Walters (Claudia Wilson Gator).
International
distribution:
New Line International.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman as male nurse Phil Parma, who cares deeply about his patients.
Over the three-and-a-bit hours of the movie, their lives intersect in unpredictable ways and they all end up wanting the same thing. “It´s a very emotional and sophisticated film,” says Sellar. “The people that you meet and get to know in this movie are people from all walks of life, yet they are looking for the same thing - for some kind of love.”
At the centre of the almost invisible web that holds Magnolia together is Robards´ character, Earl Partridge, a TV guru dying of cancer whose only wish before he dies is to see his estranged son, Frank Mackey (Cruise). Mackey has gone into television, too, and represents all that is hollow and insincere about the medium, running top-dollar seminars that teach men how to succeed with women. ‘Respect the Cock´ is his catchphrase - and he lives his life by it. Ironically, so did Earl when he was younger: Frank´s estrangement came from the fact that his father walked out on him and his mother.
Also struggling along on the same day in the Valley is a low-ranking LA cop called Jim Kurring (John C Reilly). Against all the odds, Officer Kurring actually believes in doing good, and applies the principle in his encounter with the coked-out Claudia (Melora Walters), who starts out screaming but ends up going out on a date with him.
Melora Walters as Claudia.
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Claudia provides the link with another of Magnolia´s strands: the problems of quiz-show host Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), whose image as the wholesome father figure of family television is in danger of being destroyed by revelations about his private life. Jimmy links in to Partridge because his show, What Do Kids Know?, is one that the old man originally set up. And he links into Claudia and Kurring because the former is his daughter.
Jimmy´s wife, Rose (Melinda Dillon), has remained faithful to him through thick and thin, but it is by no means certain she will survive the latest round of revelations. And then there is Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), the child prodigy who has been made a national celebrity on Jimmy´s show: he can answer any factual question but finds it impossible to relate to his father, Rick (Michael Bowen). The latter, in turn, hides the gaps in his own life by basking in the reflected glory of his brilliant son.
Echoing the latter, meanwhile, is Donnie Smith (William H Macy), who was a quiz-show star when he was a kid in the sixties, but whose life is pretty meaningless these days and whose business is just about to go under.
Last but by no means least, there are the two characters who make the connections: Earl´s young wife, Linda (Julianne Moore, who shot to fame in Boogie Nights): she married him for his money but is coming to the troubling realisation that she actually loves him; and male nurse Phil Parma (played by Anderson regular Philip Seymour Hoffman), who takes his responsibilities very seriously and is desperately trying to set up a meeting between the dying man and his son.
Magnolia is not the kind of film that it is easy to summarise, partly because it has so many stories going on at the same time, and partly because the links between them are as much thematic as they are a part of the story. But, as with Boogie Nights, Anderson is determined to find the human values, the points of real contact between people, in the apparently cold and selfish world he shows us.
Philip Baker Hall as TV host Jimmy Gator and Melinda Dillon as his trusting wife, Rose.
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The real key to Magnolia, of course, is the Valley, one of whose streets gives the film its title. “This is a movie very much about a time - 1999 - and a place: the San Fernando Valley,” says production designer Mark Bridges. “Even though it is contemporary, we approached it as a period piece, because we really wanted to peg the way things are currently - the individuality and the estrangement, the media influence and the use of clothes as hiding places.
“We also looked at films with really, really close, tight [colour] palettes, films that were warm and beautiful, and tried to analyse what made them so,” he adds, explaining how the gradually increasing sense of people coming together is as much a part of the film´s look as it is of its theme. “It was about real control with colours and shadows, letting the textures get richer and richer as the characters deepen throughout the film.”
But for all the talk of scope - and despite the movie´s 188-minute running time - all concerned are adamant that Magnolia is not an epic tale doing for the Valley what Edna Ferber did for Texas or James A Michener for Hawaii: it is a microcosm of turn-of-the-millennium life in a corner of Southern California where the temperature-change may not be as great as that in New York or Nuremberg, but where the shadings of emotion - and the depths of feeling - can be every bit as great.
Indeed, Anderson insists he originally set out to make something “small and intimate” - something that he could shoot in 30 days - after the rather larger canvas of Boogie Nights. “And I still think that Magnolia is small and intimate,” he chuckles. “It just took 200 pages and 90 days to get the right amount of small and intimate!”
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