The Miracle of Grace
FILM: Magnolia
DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas Anderson
STARRING: Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore
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FRANK (TOM CRUISE) SEEKS RECONCILIATION WITH HIS ESTRANGED FATHER, EARL (JASON
ROBARDS), IN PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON'S LATEST FILM, MAGNOLIA.
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A woman wakes up after lying in a coma for two decades. A paralyzed man throws
away his crutches and leg braces and walks unaided. A man blind since birth
suddenly can see. Science is mystified. Miracles occur. For some people, such
events are evidence of God's presence and activity in the world. One such man
is the profoundly talented young filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, director of
Boogie Nights and the current, magnificent Magnolia. Anderson
obviously believes in miracles, but the one he's most interested in is the
notion of grace, that God's love for humankind is so great that it transcends
inevitable human failing. For Christians, the apostle Paul states the
proposition bluntly in Romans 3:23: "All have sinned and fallen short of the
glory of God." Yet central to Christian theology is that the hope of redemption
can be accepted through contrite embracing of God's forgiveness. Crucially
embodied in that requisite contrition lies Jesus' instructions in the Lord's
Prayer to reflect God's forgiveness of our own trespasses by forgiving "those
who have trespassed against us." Clinging to this theology, Anderson submits
that his retinue of inherently sinful characters can know the blessing of
salvation.
Magnolia is epic in scope, but it is structured more like a
story cycle than a novel. Rather than focused on a single protagonist, its
narrative is equally spread among 11 characters, some of whom are only
tangentially connected and who never interact. Earl Partridge (Jason Robards)
is a successful television producer dying of cancer. He is bitterly estranged
from his son, Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise), who has made a fortune running
misogynistic self-help seminars for men about how to seduce and dominate women.
Earl's young wife, Linda (Julianne Moore), has turned most of Earl's care over
to male nurse Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman). One of Earl's greatest
successes is the 30-year run of a quiz program called What Do Kids
Know?, hosted throughout by seemingly genial family man Jimmy Gator (Philip
Baker Hall). Jimmy's loving, loyal wife, Rose (Melinda Dillon), either
overlooks or is unaware of his habitual philandering. And, like Earl, Jimmy is
bitterly estranged from his daughter, Claudia (Melora Walters). Claudia has a
serious drug problem that brings her to the attention of Los Angeles patrolman
Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly). Jim is not the most technically effective police
officer; he fails to notice the evidence of Claudia's drug abuse, identifying
her instead as a romantic opportunity.
Meanwhile, currently wowing audiences on What Do Kids Know?
is young Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), a sixth-grade genius whose troubled
father, Rick (Michael Bowen), is far more interested in the boy's mental
prowess than his emotional fragility. We have every reason to worry that
Stanley might some day end up like Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), a former
quiz-show kid star who is an abject middle-age failure.
In the early going of this three-hour, 10-minute film, Anderson
sets out to defy our expectations, in the process developing his characters in
far greater depth than movies commonly dare. Just as we often err in leaping to
conclusions based on first impressions, we make presumptions about the people
we meet here at considerable intellectual peril. We immediately feel pity for
Earl in his enfeebled state, but we later learn that 20 years ago, he abandoned
a wife who also lay dying with cancer. In contrast, when Earl falls asleep and
Phil instantly seeks copies of Playboy, Penthouse and
Hustler, we presume him insensitive and indecent to his patient. Then we
discover that Phil is trying to find a phone number where he might be able to
alert Frank that his father is dying. When Linda makes an appointment to see
Earl's lawyer about changing his will, we expect that she's trying to improve
her standing. Quite the opposite is true.
The film continues this way with its other characters. When Jimmy
visits Claudia and she curses him out, we think she's the cruel one. But we're
wrong. Because Jim mumbles a mantra about wanting to do good, we suspect he's
about to commit some act of violation when he arrives to investigate a domestic
disturbance at the home of a comically outraged mother. But then, we discover
that Jim is the film's moral center. An average man, hardly perfect and only
moderately bright, Jim has known failure and suffering. His acumen is not the
keenest, and his judgment is sometimes suspect. But his desire to do good is
genuine. What he lacks in mental candle power, he makes up for with the wisdom
of true decency.
Some viewers might grow weary of trying to distill a plot that
Anderson has never devised. And there's no question that some of this gifted
writer-director's decisions are questionable. For example, he begins the film
with three real-life examples of bizarre events. Three men are executed for
killing the druggist in the town of Greenberry Hill. Their names are Green,
Berry and Hill. When a forest fire is extinguished, a scuba diver in full
aquatic gear is found in the top branches of a tree; he was deposited there by
a fire department seaplane that had scooped water from the lake in which he was
diving. A man tries to commit suicide by jumping off a building, but as he's
falling past a window, he's shot and killed. A net he didn't know about would
have saved his life. The shooter, who is indicted for murder, is his own
mother. She was shooting at his father. Anderson's purpose in dramatizing these
bizarre events is to illustrate that life is hardly the orderly, explainable,
predictable cause-and-effect process we like to think it. Furthermore, he wants
to set up an outlandish (but factually precedented) development for his
picture's climax. Unfortunately, the filmmaker's first three episodes would
seem better suited to illustrate violent serendipity than his core theme of
divine forgiveness. Elsewhere, Anderson allows an instance of gun play to
dissolve into frustrating translucence. Its apparent purpose is to suggest that
Jim is a better man unarmed and that God's own hand has been raised against his
use of a weapon. But the viewer has to work too hard to arrive at such an
understanding.
These are entirely minor complaints, however. And the diminution of
conventional plot is precisely what Anderson intended. People's lives encounter
crises, but they don't play themselves out in tidy three-act packages.
Resolution of some kind is provided for some; others are left still in process,
their fates to greater and lesser degrees uncertain. In short, Anderson is
interested in storytelling centered wholly in character, the revelation of a
series of contemporary people in all their contradictory complication. Frank is
a sexist monster. He also is a devoted son to a stricken mother and desperately
yearning for the love of a father who abandoned him. Earl is a heel, a man who
put his own comfort and pleasure above such higher virtues as duty, loyalty and
paternity. But he also is a man who knows he has sinned grievously and conveys
regret before it's too late. Linda is a self-confessed gold-digger who married
an older man solely for access to his wealth. She is redeemed by recognizing
her perfidy; more, she is redeemed by discovering love for the man she came to
exploit. A jive-talking street urchin named Dixon (Emmanuel Johnson) is a
hustler who tries to sell the police information about a murder. At a critical
moment, he takes advantage of someone incapacitated and steals all her money,
but he also bothers to call an ambulance.
Absolutely instructive in Anderson's determination to show the
light and the dark in everyone are the developments in Jimmy Gator's life. Like
Earl, Jimmy is dying of cancer. His remaining days are few. Like Earl, he wants
to make peace with those he has abused, but, unlike Earl, Jimmy cannot make a
good act of contrition. He confesses some of his sins, but not all. Thus,
whereas Earl first is reunited with his child and finally released from the
torment of his body, Jimmy is first left alone, and then, the weapon of escape
almost literally slapped away by the intervening hand of God, Jimmy is denied
release -- perhaps to be damned, perhaps yet to be redeemed.
In an Oscar year in which another superb film, writer Alan Ball and
director Sam Mendes' American Beauty, also has explored the contemporary
family, Anderson obviously is concerned about relationships between parents and
children. Magnolia frets that parents too often indulge themselves at
the expense of their children's psychological well-being. Earl's selfishness
begets Frank's sexual viciousness. Jimmy's lack of self-control begets
Claudia's helplessness. Donnie Smith's parents' greed has left him an emotional
and occupational cripple. What fate lies in store for young Stanley? But
Anderson is no mere finger-pointer. He offers a road to recovery. The first
step has to be remorse. But the second step, far more difficult, is that of
forgiveness. There is very much more that can and ought to be said about this
brave, innovative, ground-breaking movie, but it is perhaps enough to say that,
without including a single image of a church or the utterance of even a
syllable by a cleric, Magnolia is as devoutly religious a film as I've
seen in years.
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