Kino Meditations

**Spoilers below**

I first saw Magnolia (1999) when I was maybe 13 or 14 years old, as I was first getting into movies. At the time, I had just seen Pulp Fiction (1994), and was incessantly looking for more films like it. I grew fascinated by Hyperlink cinema and interconnected stories. It seemed so cool to me that, in what seemed like different vignettes in an anthology, characters from a certain chapter would appear in another chapter, making the world feel truly lived in, and giving the story a sense of realism I hadn’t seen before. It really felt like you were watching intertwined lives, brought together by some random event, such as a diner robbery or the hunt for a family heirloom.

I came across Magnolia as another example of this “sub-genre”, if you will, right around the time I also started paying attention to Tom Cruise. He was the “Mission: Impossible guy”, sure, but he was also in other films like Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003) and Collateral (2004), which were all early favorites of mine. I looked up a clip of his performance in this film on YouTube, and just knew I had to see the rest.

Back then, I’m sure a lot went over my head. Not the interconnectivity of it all, which is laid out pretty comprehensively so the viewer does not to miss anything, but a lot of the themes and meaning behind most of the scenes. Why are they all singing the same song at the same time? Are they all tuned in to the same radio station at the same moment? Why are frogs raining from the sky? Can such a thing even happen?

First, some backstory. Paul Thomas Anderson first directed Hard Eight (1996) a few years earlier, based on a short film that premiered at Sundance in 1993. After that, came Boogie Nights in 1997, with a large ensemble cast that featured Mark Wahlberg in the lead role, and Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Heather Graham and many others in supporting. This film signaled his arrival in Hollywood in a huge way, as he proved that he too could hang with the likes of Scorsese and Tarantino.

During Boogie Night’s long post-production phase, the first ideas for Magnolia started to take shape. After the success of Boogie Nights, New Line Cinema, who had financed it, told Anderson he could do whatever he wanted for his next project. While at first he wanted to do a smaller film, more “intimate and small-scale”, it eventually grew in scale and ambition. His goal then became to make an epic, but on a topic that doesn’t “necessarily get the epic treatment”, the all-time great San Fernando Valley movie, the region in Californa where he had grown up.

Inspired by the music of Aimee Mann as he started writing the script, Anderson also elected to work with a lot of the people he had established a working relationship with already, from the time of his previous two films. Cruise was a fan of Boogie Nights (1997), and wanted to work with PTA, contacting him while still working on Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick’s film, that was proving to be a long and difficult shoot (holding the record for the longest constant movie shoot that ran for over 400 days). Anderson met with the actor on the set of Kubrick’s film, to discuss ideas, with Cruise telling the director to keep him in mind. The role was a major departure from the roles Cruise was used to play, as an outlandish pick-up artist and sex guru, hiding vulnerability and secrets from the past behind the bigger-than-life facade.

Magnolia rocked me to my core, even if it confounded me. In the years since, I have watched many more films, and not just films with interconnected tales, but films dealing with melancholia, loneliness, regret, forgiveness. Very few have touched me like this one had. Every so often I would be reminded of a particular scene in this film, and I would promptly check it out on YouTube again. Interestingly, however, I could not bring myself to seeing the film again from scratch. Perhaps its runtime rendered it too daunting a task? Or did the characters seem too self-involved, and the situations too unrealistic and coincidental, that I could not bring myself to see them again, even if I still liked the film? I don’t really know. The songs did stay with me. I was first introduced to Aimee Mann by Magnolia, as well as Supertramp, whose song “Goodbye Stranger” played in one specific scene that was engraved in my mind for years to come. I finally decided to rewatch it recently. Perhaps in preparation for PTA’s new film, One Battle After Another, which opens in roughly 2 and half weeks in theaters, or perhaps because I just felt it was time. Regardless, it has been too long. While I have seen many films that dealt with similar themes, as I mentioned earlier, none are quite like this one. Sure, you could say the director is just riffing on the work of Robert Altman (particularly Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993)), something with which Anderson himself would probably agree, yet I still think this is a remarkable piece of work, one so bold and ambitious, it’s only natural it is also messy and flawed. You can’t help but be compelled by it.

What were the most puzzling scenes for me 13 years ago, are now my favorites in this over-3-hours-long melodrama. The multiple references to Exodus 8:2, which states “If you refuse to let them go, I will send a plague of frogs on your whole country/land”, brings home the theme of forgiveness that perpetuates throughout the film. “You may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with you”, characters keep repeating, as if to say, you are always the product of your experiences and traumas, even if you are able to move on from them. These characters are all entangled in a web of adultery, abuse, regret, loneliness and search for meaning, and they are all brought to life by magnificent performances, none better than Tom Cruise, who gives career best work in this, which really should have earned him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (he was nominated, lost out to Michael Caine for The Cider House Rules).

Nearly every character functions as an example of the lasting outcome childhood trauma, in its many forms, can take. From the inability to form lasting relationships, to perpetual anxiety, to awkwardness, to raging coke addictions, these are all the result of abuse and neglect from parents, specially fathers. Whether it’s being absent during a significant other’s illness, sexual abuse or exploitation, they have a profound effect in the personality of all these people. Perhaps I too needed to experience more life to better feel everything that is on display in the film. When I first watched it, a lot of the scenes left an impression on me, but a lot of those impressions were of bewilderment. I guess part of me found it funny how fucked up these people are. Watching it now, while the situations remain funny, the impression the scenes produced in me were of recognition and identification. While I haven’t exactly suffered these exact same traumas that the characters have, there were instances where I felt somewhat vindicated by the reactions. I have experienced heartbreak, lost loved ones, experimented with drugs, had a falling out with my father at one point, and all of this has led me to be less of the person I have most desired to be during certain moments in my life, perhaps more selfish, insecure and narcissistic than I’d like. Seeing characters lash out in anger, and be entirely unfair in several circumstances felt real and authentic to my own experience.

At the end of the day (literally, in this case) all these lives, which were thinly connected before (Philip Baked Hall plays the Game Show host of a program produced by Jason Robard’s character, a program in which Wlliam H. Macy’s Donny Smith has appeared, for example), are ultimately brought together by chance. Frogs begin raining down from the sky, to the shock and surprise of all characters, bar one. All these people leading their lives as if they were not vulnerable to chance encounters and interruptions come to learn that the universe does not revolve around them. I have learned this very same lesson in the years since I first watched the film. Sometimes, it really is mere coincidence. It is as the narrator of the movie (who shows up only during the opening sequence and the ending) tells us right at the beginning: “These strange things happen all the time”.

We all have experienced some form of trauma in our lives, and we will continue to experience it. I think it’s important to remember that, no matter the circumstances, and how impossible they may seem, it is not just happening to us. We are all connected in a complicated web of relationships, and only through understanding and forgiveness can we hope to overcome the negative impact these can have on our personalities. While some things may be too difficult to move past from, and outright forgive, we can all find solace from the fact that we are not alone, and derive healing from connection, to friends, family, or a loved one. I think it’s incredibly poignant to end the film with Melora Walters smiling, in what almost seems like a fourth-wall break, to signify that Claudia too, the character she plays, can find love, after a lifetime of suffering from abuse. I too, have found it, rendering this all the more powerful. I hope you can too, in whatever way it may arrive.

“But if you can forgive someone… Well, that’s the tough part. What can we forgive?”