The Set-Up
The more I watch Magnolia the less I understand it. It’s like a chocolate digestive biscuit: it tastes better the more you dunk it in tea but in doing so you lose its biscuity identity as it become soggy and unmanageable. The more you watch Magnolia, the more opaque it gets. I first saw the film a few days before embarking on a cinematic pilgrimage to Birmingham, as all cinematic pilgrimages eventually lead, to watch another Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece, the macabre There Will Be Blood. I was living in Leamington Spa for reasons I’d rather not get into and, not content to wait a week to watch the film in my local Apollo cinema: a cinematic environment equitable to your Nan’s front room, I journeyed the 45 minutes-plus to embark on a weekend screening and fans of that film will know it was worth it. They will also be well aware of the supremely talented director’s (perhaps the best of his generation?) ability to construct fascinating and oblique constructions of cinema: movies that the experience of watching are like attempting to run on a treadmill at too high a setting. The moment you begin to think you’ve managed to get to grips with one of P.T.’s films, he drinks your milkshake. He drinks it up.
I love There Will Be Blood, I really like Boogie Nights and I am fascinated by Punch-Drunk Love but, for me, the film of his I keep returning to more than any others is certainly Magnolia. Perhaps this is because it is the first I saw out of all of these works, but I somehow doubt that. Instead, I think the reason I return again and again is because I seek to conquer it. I want to champion the film, to do battle with its plot and hold its themes above my head like the severed head of Medusa. And yet, I have consistently failed to do that. The film is thoroughly indigestible. Uncompromisingly ambitious and deliciously sprawling in scope and ambition, the film embarks on the fine cinematic tradition of the multi-stranded city narrative, telling various stories that happen at the same time in the same city, in the manner of Robert Altman’s Shortcuts or Paul Haggis’ Crash (although the latter comparison does the film a terrible disservice). However, rather than clutching at a decent handful of narrative straws and tying them together with a couple of coincidence-bound plot bands, Magnolia grabs the entire jar and throws it at you, scattering items all over the floor in a glorious mess of complexity. The stories are based around two seemingly separate worlds, one the family of a dying network executive that includes a suicidal money-grabbing wife played by Julianne Moore, a misogynist sex-guru son played brilliantly by Tom Cruise (Yes. That one.) and a faithful nurse played by Philip Seymour Hoffmann. The other narrative centres around the production of a T.V. game show and includes stories about child geniuses and their relationships with the fathers and former child geniuses and their relationships with everyone else.
This summary just touches the surface though and, crucially, at very few points in the narratives do many of these stories interact. Rather than being a rather comfortable thematically connected series of events, the film is a deliberately sprawling, deliberately tangled, deliberately idiosyncratic collage of city life. It is a film invested in presenting stories entrenched in naturalism, yet also deeply melodramatic. It is a film that seems to glimpse at something beyond life and material existence, yet is also rather scorningly cynical about such things. The film is realist, its operatic, its simplistic, its deliberate, its obtuse, its baffling, and it incredibly biblical to bout. Or is it? I just don’t know anymore. Over the years I have slowly come to terms with the fact that I will probably never fully understand its intricacies. In fact, I’m not sure it is a film that is able to be understood. It deliberately contradicts itself on numerous occasions and seems to playfully provide audiences with numerous riddles and puzzles to add to the already complex narrative it tells in over 3 hours of cinematic quagmire. What I do take from the film though, what responds with me, is largely encapsulated in one such scene of directorial defiance. It is cinema, in all its brazen totality, and I love it all the more for it.
The Scene (2.13.45-2.17.01)
Magnolia is not a laugh riot. After watching well over two hours of suffering, one could be forgiven for basely wishing they could have a break and a bit of a cheer up session. We might forgiven for finding ourselves thinking that perhaps the characters could down the tools of their hefty narrative arcs and pause for a moment for a bit of light relief, perhaps even a sing-song. But we of course would not expect the director to honour these base requests, no no, this is much too serious a film for something like that to happen. And yet, after over two hours of collective suffering, this is precisely what Anderson does. In a deliberately confrontational piece of filmmaking, the characters do indeed stop what they are doing and start to have a bit of a sing. All of them. Together. It makes no narrative sense nor does it make diegetic sense. This is not a world of song an dance, this is a world of suffering and melancholia and, yet it happens nonetheless. And the result, well, it’s quite close to the sublime.
The scene begins with a nurse fatally administering drugs to his patient, an old man dying of a terminal illness, in order to ease his suffering. Played expertly as always by Philip Seymour Hoffmann, this nurse, Phil, experiences a mournful abyss of emotion as he performs this task and a close-up looms on his face magnifies the suffering. This is not the start of a typical musical extravaganza. There is no rhythmical utopia on the horizon. Instead, the image seems hopeless, like most of the film itself. Phil struggles with the bleakness of the events and the ramifications of his actions, all of which are etched painfully on his skin, and the whole cinematic horizon of shot is bound up in grief and anguish. The camera hangs on this, taking us to a precipice of a weighty melancholic miasma. Then suddenly, from out of nowhere, there is a trace of light and clarity. As the close-up hangs on Philip Seymour Hoffman, a faint trace of music is suddenly heard in the background. It is too quiet for us to be sure its there, but too loud to be ignored either. Our ears prick up, our curiosity is engaged and, as the volume increases, there is suddenly a sense of hope.
We quickly realise beyond any doubt that there is indeed music playing, music that quickly dominates the soundscape and engulfs the tears and quiet despair that previously filled the soundtrack. Whilst we were previously in a realm of utter harshness, the visuals entrenched in as seemingly realist narrative, but now there is this music and the image suddenly has a rather operatic nature to it. However, as if to remind to remain focusing on the worldly, the close-up of Hoffmann cuts quickly to a shot of another character’s suffering. This time, it is Claudia (
Melora Walters), who is seen crying alone and snorting cocaine. We are still far from Singin’ in the Rain territory. However, despite the fact that we are visually still in the same, familiar territory of worldly suffering, the entire tone of the scene has been fundamentally altered by the introduction of this music. Suddenly, everything has changed. Suddenly, the image has a life behind it, a glow, a soul, and this light begins to shine out more and more. As Aimee Mann’s blissfully elegiac voice begins to sing out, the music becomes an intrinsic part of that which we are experiencing. This is not a woman suffering alone, this is a woman suffering with a world behind her.
Foolishly, our minds begin to conjure a rather rational option to all of this. As we witness the cross-cutting between two static characters edited to the music, we begin to conclude that we are in fact watching is a nice, thematic montage sequence in the manner of those placed at the end of every American drama episode of the last five years. We believe that we are going to get a tiny moment of clarity and a presentation of the films moral message in a nice neat musical bow, and perhaps more shots of everyone suffering as the song is placed unobtrusively in the background. We settle back into our seats and imagine that we are watching Grey’s Anatomy. But we are not, and Anderson knows this. Just then, just when everything seems to make sense, Claudia begins to sing along. In case you didn’t believe what you are seeing, the camera focuses upon it this with a slow zoom into a close up.
Hang on, we think, this isn’t a musical? This is serious filmmaking, films about deep things and important stuff. This isn’t a place for Gene Kelly or Julie Andrews and all that other stuff. Maybe she’s listening to the song in her apartment, yeah, maybe that’s it? As if to dash this dream, we cut to John C. Reilly’s policeman, who is also singing, singing in another part of the city at precisely the same time. The films temporal relationship has already been acutely established. We are told frequently that these events are all happening together around one day, so we are therefore forced to conclude that all these characters are indeed singing along together. Why are they singing? They are singing, aren’t they?
Yes they are, the film seem to answer.
The scene continues, cutting between other characters, all of them in similar static positions and shot with a camera that moves between them with an increasing ease and fluidity. As various other characters all join in, we are forced to comprehend a fundamental break from the preconceived notions of realism we have previously assumed. Then, to shatter these completely, the film then presents the unconscious dying man, who also promptly joins in, as does his wife who we have just seen pass out in her car. The supposed realism of the film is destroyed, all notions of plausibility are eradicated, and we are left with an awareness of artifice, an awareness of the cinematic nature of it all, of its lack of life, its lack of reality and the manipulations of camera and genre and directors and actors. But the scene is hardly Brechtian either. It does not ask us to take a step back and become aware of the project’s political subtext. There is nothing cold and intellectual about what’s going on. It’s profoundly warm, it’s entrancing and, dare we say it, it’s also rather beautiful. The song breaks apart its assumed reality to construct an altogether more pleasant place to be.
A lot of this beauty originates from the marvellous song by Aimee Mann; a brilliant choice of music by Anderson. ‘Wise Up’ provides a strikingly relevant and searingly poetic discourse on the events so far whilst also presenting the universal joys of simple melody construction. With a deep majesty, the singer seems to describe a transcendent commentary on the film’s narrative, asking the various characters in the pits of self-destruction to indeed wise up. However, the beauty is more deep-seated then the level of song choice. It is about songs and music in general. In the midst of this profoundly upsetting and pitiful collection of events that seemed at times never-ending, there is suddenly a moment where everything is joined, everything is as one. It is perhaps the only time in the film where the city life focuses up on is presented as somehow whole rather than a diverging collection of events and stuff. In a mire of very human feeling and suffering, very base action with very base characters, there is suddenly this moment of grace, where the whole film is united in a great sequence of unity and resplendence. The rest of the film is like a spider’s web, complex and untidy and a little bit dirty, but this sequence takes the web and spins it together to make silk. In a quagmire of suffering, the audience is suddenly reminded of grand things like music. Up until this point, characters have consistently used their voices to insult and shout at each other. Now, they use it for song.
On another level, travelling further upwards, the scene seems almost a celebration of cinema itself. The city life present scattered and unclear but in one moment it can present itself in a photographed image as clear. Edits and framings and shots can make life comprehensible, cinema can make life comprehensible, but it does this with an artifice. In fact, this scene is not more constructed than any other so far. Everything has been created, contorted, controlled by Anderson, and this the narrativised life is now just made overt. Cinema is grace and the scene wallows in this. Then, mournfully and terribly, the scene returns to our regularly scheduled programme, as the music fades away to the sound of rain: a powerful omen of things to come. Without explanation, without apology, the scene is an oddball in an odd movie, but, if anything, it is the key scene in a profoundly rich film. It seems arbitrary, but it is hard to declare it as all a matter of chance.