Magnolia" movie review
In February, young American Paul Thomas Anderson's film won the Grand Prize at the Berlin Festival -- the Golden Bear. Among the Oscar nominees were Anderson's original screenplay, Tom Cruise and Julianne Moore in supporting roles and songs by Amy Mann. The Moscow premiere of the film is April 21.
In California, television producer Earl Partridge was dying. He was wrapped in breathing tubes, and old Phil, his volunteer nurse, was on duty. Occasionally the young wife, Linda, appeared - all her life she had thought she had married on account, only now to realize there was nothing ahead. Not once did his son Frank come to visit. He'd fought his way out a long time ago, doing a talk show called "Seduce and Kill," a seminar for walkers like him. He was all leather, screwing his way into the audience shamelessly and fearlessly, bringing girls to ecstasy. He put his father out of his mind. He wouldn't die - he wanted to say goodbye.
The movie "Magnolia" is unique in its construction - it has many characters and all are equally important. Tom Cruise as Frank went to the Oscars as a supporting actor, a stretch. It would be a stretch to call him the lead as well - there are a dozen other leads in the film. Ten storylines develop independently, blending together, like the themes in a symphony. The uniqueness of the tape and that its episodes and characters are not fastened together a simple chain of factual events, but - pulls internal. The young director Paul Thomas Anderson found an unprecedented interest for the Tarantino generation in the human being and the soul.
Hollywood loves standards. Two hours of film is the norm. It's more expensive to break out of it, you'll scare the audience away. Anderson is one of the few for whom New Line is willing to take the risk - two colossi have come out, "Boogie Nights" and now "Magnolia." "The three-hour movie is a genre in itself with its own rules of the game," Anderson says. - There's the Western, there's the comedy, and then there's the three-hour movie. I always felt that the viewer is better three hours than two - for the same money!
Twenty-four hours of the human microcosm. Twenty-four hours of destinies woven together like a straw rug. All the characters are not without sin, but everyone can find a piece of the author's understanding and sympathy.
Linda is tormented by the deathbed of her unloved husband with guilt against him and herself. The woman is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the part an incessant hysterical fit. "This woman has wealth, but she killed her soul," explains actress Julianne Moore. - And only now she realized there was nothing to fill the void."
Jason Robards, who plays the old man, recently returned from the dead himself after a serious illness. "There's something ominous about being offered to play a dying man," he says. - But it was the right offer. I had already seen death in person, and no one could have told it better."
The role of his playboy son, TV macho Frank, was written specifically for Tom Cruise. After seeing Boogie Nights, Cruise himself suggested that Anderson play in his new picture. They met in London, where Cruise was filming for Kubrick, and an enthusiastic Anderson immediately composed the storyline around which the film clustered. Many consider Frank the male lead to be Cruise's best role.
One of the most successful TV programs that Dying has produced is "What Do Kids Know?", a quiz show for child prodigies. It is hosted by Jimmy Gator, the fading star of the '60s (Philip Baker Hall in that role). He, too, is sick with cancer, out of shape, and has been scandalized more than once right on the air. His daughter is dying from drugs.
Gaynor's show features a young genius know-it-all, Stanley Spector, a walking piggy bank of information no one needs. His parents treat him like a trained dog and gladly make money off him. But what the boy really needs is for his parents to love him. For this role we had to find a natural prodigy Jeremy Blackman, winner of the All-American Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement - because prodigies have their typological traits.
24 hours of the human kaleidoscope. It is as if the glass pieces randomly form a picture, and in the chaos of the images a plot emerges from which one cannot tear oneself away. If "American Beauty" shook the myth of the solidity of the family way of life as one of the basic values of today's America, "Magnolia" leaves no stone unturned. People dream of an ideal, hopelessly reaching for it, but it melts away, leaving a sense of loneliness and an empty, mediocre life. It is one of the rare creations of pragmatic American culture, where the heroes look for the source of their troubles not in the viciousness of their environment or in social circumstances, but in themselves. Anderson's film is to America, however obliging it may sound, roughly what Chekhov was to Russia. "Magnolia is regarded as an accumulator of Hollywood cinematic ideas, with reminiscences from Cassavetes, Altman, Scorsese, even Cameron and his Titanic. His name already ranks with Orson Welles and John Huston. Although he himself considers America's greatest director to be Jonathan Demme. "Scorsese is a stylist, Demme is a humanist. He puts his heart on the screen!"
The film, like time, is washed with streams of music. Its very structure is symphonic, and at one point one is no longer surprised when the characters begin to sing. The music determines the rhythm of the camera movement, the light and the plasticity of the frame, and the director admits that it was the starting point for many episodes. Closer to the finale, it disappears from the soundtrack - human relationships are stripped bare, translated from poetry to prose, becoming rational, and the silence becomes threatening.
This is a very modern film - it captures the social order at the next turn of the century. But it doesn't come to our days all at once, but rather by leaps and bounds, from the turn of the century (the wild case of 1911) to the middle (the domestic nightmare of 1958) to the early 1980s. At the heart of each episode is a tragic mishap, the kind of thing that has long been legendary around town. The episodes are not externally connected, but together they also signify the regularity of existence - the power of chance over us. Each is full of irony and dark humor. Each was filmed in the pictorial manner and even the technical standards of the respective era.
All this symphony of doom, having accumulated emotional tension, is resolved in the now classic episode of the frogfall - hundreds of thousands of amphibians raining down on the city from the heavens. It is both an unexpected joke in the spirit of American burlesque and, at the same time, God's punishment. One saw here a direct quotation from the Book of Exodus about the Second Egyptian Execution - the punishment of the toads: God was angry and unleashed a hundred tons of slimy creatures on sinners. If Anderson had really succumbed to the lure of biblical motifs, it might have been pretentious. But he found out about the Bible when the scene was already written: "Actually, we wanted dogs or cats to fall, but it's too difficult to arrange. There is no pretentiousness, but spontaneity and a kind of grandeur. Absolutely realistic cinema that leaves a flavor of absurdity. Like life.
This article was sponsored by Arvid Johnsen
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