Magnolia

Presence--with a double ass meaning.

Gifts I bestow

With my riff, and my flow.

he main title sequence of Magnolia begins with a time-lapse bud bursting into bloom, superimposed over a vibrant infrared street map of the San Fernando Valley. This explosion of imagery announces the technique (and the theme) of superimposition that writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson will use a hundred times over in the three hours of the film: superimposing tragedy on comedy, the moral over the commercial, and the marvelous upon the mundane. Two meanings of the title are layered in this initial image—the blossom and the boulevard.

In the film's publicity poster, visibly woven into the stigma of that same blooming magnolia are spread-eagled frogs—the frogs that will, astonishingly, rain down on Magnolia Boulevard in the movie's climax. This points to a third layer of meaning for Magnolia: the almost-homonym "Magonia," the name of a cloud-like land beyond the sky, known in French medieval folklore as the place into which signs and wonders disappear. Sometimes—as with those frogs—such wonders return just as unaccountably to earth, profoundly affecting the destinies of suffering human beings. 

In Magnolia, Anderson builds up layers of significance with accelerating effect. He quadruple-layers sound (live voice over blasting stereo over TV broadcast over soundtrack lyric), sequences match-cut after dazzling match-cut, cycles key elements of dialogue through the mouths of multiple speakers, and repeatedly parallels the trajectory of one character's life with those of others. Anderson's obsession with simultaneity is evidenced by the use of the transitional instruction "THAT MOMENT" over 200 times in his shooting script.

Donnie climbs the stairs.

Over and over his cuts not only shift attention from one set of events to the next, but multiply the cumulative force of the pair. The juxtaposition of stage father Rick Spector's white sports car with former child star Donnie's little white Honda skewers the greed of parents who confiscate their whiz-kids' winnings; sympathetic policemanJim Kurring manages to swallow a sip of Claudia's terrible twice-brewed coffee while corrupt quiz-show host Jimmy Gator knocks back the last shot of the whiskey he needs to forget his incestuous intrusions upon his daughter; Jim's benign dating-service recording is paired with slick video promos for Male power guru Frank T. J. Mackey's1-877-TAME-HER. Frank's career ironically professionalizes his father's abandonment of his mother; and Frank himself is first seen dramatically back-lit, flexing his quite ordinary muscles, aping a schlock gladiator to the soaring trumpets of "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Anderson's sharp aural/visual jokes resonate as they quietly accumulate.

But you can't hear me though

Think fast, catch me—yo

Cause I throw what I know

With a Resonance.

This technique risks a very specific kind of failure; if no reviewer quite called Anderson an idiot, there was no shortage of those who concluded that the sound and fury of his latest film signified nothing, or at least not enough. The standard take paid lip service to the young filmmaker's talent, energy, and ambition, while trashing the film's failures of structure and meaning. Long on technique, short on narrative significance—that was the consensus.

"[What's] missing is an anchor, something that ties Anderson's multiple story lines together in a way that makes them greater than the sum of their parts," concluded Scott Renshaw the film review site, Rotten Tomatoes. "Anderson needs to find a way to integrate his wilder impulses with a more stringent discipline," scolded Salon's Charles Taylor. Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times complained that "Some of the film's emotional payoffs are predictable and less than profound." David Sterritt, staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor, echoed the failed payoff line: Anderson was "straining so hard to cook up a great encore [to Boogie Nights] that he forgot to make his tricks and gimmicks add up to anything."

Reviewers like these should really stick to watching reruns of Too Close for Comfort. All the characters in Magnolia are inextricably entangled in one another's pasts and fates: Donnie Smith was once a contestant on What Do Kids Know?; Stanley Spector is the show's current champion; Jimmy Gator has been the host for decades; Earl Partridge is the former producer; Frank is his son. The father who ruined Claudia's life and the man who may save her have the same first name, but it's their last names that spell out the difference between them: Kurring's a source of caring for her, Gator her reptilian predator. And all these characters face the same challenge, in different forms; to face up to their pasts, to "wise up," to change or die horribly.

But this is only the psychological first layer—the magnolia blossom layer (a layer full of faces in the movie poster)—of the confusions Anderson dares to confront. The second layer—the Magnolia Boulevard layer (envisioned in the title credits as a street map and in the poster as a whirlpool)—is cultural: a failure to see that our own dominant but dead-end consumer-industrial culture is not the only human option, however powerfully it seems to be pulling us down. Finally, the third layer—the Magonia layer, represented visually by the ruggedly gorgeous cloud banks seen behind the weather title "99% Humidity/  Light Showers"—finally poses its own most crucial challenge: the spiritual. 

In return for asking that we absorb all of this, Anderson pledges not only "to make the mother of all movies about the Valley," but "in the most honest and unashamed way—to write a great film."

The list of great Valley flicks begins with Chinatown, a classic account of decent people left dead and damaged by incestuous patriarchal lust and greed. Other outstanding examples include Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Anderson's own Boogie Nights" Anderson's concerns in Magnolia plainly overlap with those of Altman and Polanski: adultery, sexual abuse, ruined children, venal magnates. But in Magnolia he thinks past the showy brutality of the thugs who do mogul Noah Cross's dirty work in Chinatown, and displaces Altman's icy stares and dry-eyed shouting. In so doing, Anderson surpasses the merely spectacular meltdowns, overdoses, and bloodbaths that punctuate Boogie Nights, and accelerates toward the miracle of a group epiphany.

In its central narrative, Magnolia rigorously juxtaposes an ensemble of nine major characters caught in moments of agony, rage, fear, shame, and grief—and not one escapes with dry cheeks. This piling up of emotions is unmistakably loud and relentless.

* * *

Anderson shares with Raymond Carver, from whom Altman famously drew material for "Short Cuts," a sharp ear for contemporary idioms. "Bottom line?" Frank T. J. Mackey asks his hyped-up Seduce and Destroy clientele. "Language! The magical key to unlocking any woman's analytical ability and tapping directly into her hopes, wants, fears, desires—and her sweet little panties." Set against the transparent appeals of Frank's linear rhetoric, the speech of Anderson's more honest characters constructs a densely woven and steadily escalating meditation upon the troubled layers of human identity—the psychological, the cultural, and the spiritual. In all of them, he suggests, a language-mad confusion reigns.

As voice after voice—first Jimmy's, now Donnie's, later the unnamed narrator's—will repeat in this movie (echoing the theme of Chinatown), "We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us." The past persists in the compulsion to repeat it, and we should understand the engraved instruction "Do Not Duplicate," which appears in extreme close-up on the keys which Donnie miserably turns over to his boss Solomon Solomon, as a warning against duplication of his quintessentially capitalist fate—having his talent appropriated for the material benefit of others.

Just as Donnie's parents squandered his winnings years ago, so Solomon Electronics uses his fading child-star image to sell appliances. Stanley, by contrast, rebels against his own exploitation: we see him escaping back into books while Donnie gets sacked. Using his illicitly-made duplicate keys, Donnie breaks into his former employer's store, very nearly locking himself into one more failure—an implication flagged when his key breaks off in the exterior door. In a not-quite-too-late moment of lucidity, Donnie screams at himself, "What am I doing? What the fuck am I doing?" He's too confused by his past to be sure, but unlike TV baron Earl Partridge (who succumbs to his cancer still moaning "What did I do? What did I do?") Donnie is earning a chance to heal. This juxtaposition of change-or-death operates consistently in Anderson's pairings of characters, and at the same time introduces the broader cultural message that without transformation we're all doomed.

Anderson's concern with the need for a more general cultural awakening is signaled nowhere more decisively than in his extraordinary collaboration with Aimee Mann, in whose songs romantic suffering consistently point toward much broader social criticism. 

Some critics complained loudly about the alleged intrusiveness of the film's score. Charles Taylor found it a positive obstacle to understanding: "When Mann's songs aren't playing, Jon Brion's score is, and I don't think I've ever heard a more distracting use of music in a movie." We've grown so used to the Kubrickian use of film music as perversely ironic counterpoint (see the cliche of violence set to inane pop tunes devolving from "Singin' in the Rain" in A Clockwork Orange through "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet to “Dancin’ in the Middle with You” in Reservoir Dogs), that Aimee Mann's frank, earnest appeals directly to the audience left critics nonplussed or derisive. Consider the closing lines of "Momentum": "I can't admit that maybe the past was bad / And so, for the sake of momentum / I'm condemning myself to death / So it can match the past." Mann's not doing self-help pop-psychology here; this is cultural anthropology of the most urgent sort, mocking the culturally dominant conservatives whose refusal to acknowledge the sins of our history risks condemning us all.  

Anderson's attention to the fast-approaching crisis of our cultural delusions is plainest in his use of Mann's haunting "Wise Up." This is not to be mistaken for another pop lament about troubles in love. It's about the dead-end direction of an entire culture which can't stop consuming itself into psychosis—and so now races toward oblivion: "It's not what you thought/ When you first began it / You got what you want / Now you can hardly stand it / Though by now you know / It's not going to stop." When the scattered but intertwined Magnolia ensemble is suddenly unified, singing its way line by line and character by character through this song's lyrics, much more's at stake than a chorus-effect.

Pop music used in a fractured-opera style is hardly surprising in a film featuring one 10-year-old who raps as "the Prophet, the Professor" and another who sings four lines from "Un oiseau rebelle" in the original French. The entire Carmen aria is cued over Jim's struggle to negotiate his way from on-call policeman to potential boyfriend. (Claudia, whose light-deprived apartment is littered with dead flowers, may seem an unlikely gypsy-seductress, but the lover from Carmen was a soldier doing domestic policing.)

In Donnie's dreary childhood-haunted apartment, by contrast, looming on the wall above the Cocoa-Pebbles and the Honey-in-a-Bear is a blown-up photo of a check for $100,000 from First Mutual Trust/ Main Branch/ Hollywood, California. It's signed by Jimmy Gator and made out "For: Superior Knowledge." But this is only the stolen money awarded for a "head full of useless knowledge" over which Donnie grieves at the Smiling Peanut bar. Stanley, Donnie's younger counterpart, wises up, directly challenging not only his father, but game-show host Jimmy: "I'm smart, so I'm made to feel like a freak? What is that? I'm asking you."

Jimmy replies "I'm not sure, Stanley." ("Our Kids Teach Us" reads the logo on the back of the game cards Jimmy holds throughout the broadcast of his show, What Do Kids Know?.) But this is only Jimmy's infectious mendacity, which has spread to his contestant coordinator, Cynthia, who claims to have "no idea" what's wrong with Stanley although she's the one who refused him a bathroom break. Jimmy is clearly to blame for the subservient lies of those around him. A WDKK? promo describes him as having a "bouncing baby grandchild on the way"—a cruel and obvious lie since Claudia is his only child.

In the meantime, mundane sins proliferate. There's exploitation (especially of children), profligate abuse of trust, and plenty of casual greed and insensitivity. Dishonesty is inextricably tied to the chronic infidelity we see and hear about. Both Earl Partridge and Jimmy Gator confess to having habitually cheated on their wives. In fact, we first see Jimmy nailing a showgirl from behind even as that promo extols his virtues as a family man.

Anderson's disapproval is tinged with candid amusement. "It's universal. It's evolutionary. It's anthropological. It's biological. It is animal!" Frank exclaims. "We are men!" Well, actually, in Anderson's visual language, we're dogs.  One long, scene-ending shot shows four mutts sprawled around the faithless Earl Partridge's deathbed; it's matched to the first image of Frank—a grinning Doberman himself in his shiny blue-black leather vest—framed by a banner picturing a wolf hot in leering sexual pursuit of a cat, captioned, "No Pussy Has Nine Lives." Excited by his interview with the investigative reporter Gwenovier , Frank shakes his sleek head back and forth, right to left, panting as his tongue wags. Gwen, plays along, scolding him "Calm down! Take it easy! Be a good boy." Two statues of dogs lurk in the shadows on Earl Partridge's desk. Only the close identification of Earl with his dogs explains the vehemence of Frank's twice-repeated threat to "fucking drop-kick those dogs if they come near me." And when nurse Phil Parma finally administers the fatal liquid morphine drops to Earl, the implication that he's putting a dog to sleep is underlined not only by the simultaneous death of one of those mutts (from gobbling up spilled pills), but by the twin gurneys on which the corpses of man and his best friend are wheeled out single-file.

Yet, female characters like Claudia and Earl's wife Linda Partridge also make dubious sexual choices.LAPD officer Jim Kurring is just one of several characters to complain, "It's raining cats and dogs," a phrase we should read as describing the destruction of women and men alike.

Linda Partridge

Most damagingly, there's the old story of adults violating children. Child abuse is perpetuated in the thirty-year run of WDKK?, the climactic sequence of which first ties together the entire ensemble. Stanley repeatedly fails to make himself heard by the What Do Kids Know? studio assistant Cynthia, and by his fellow kid-contestants, and even by his father when he tries to say how urgently he needs to pee. After Rick exposes his son's stained pants, this smarmy dad thinks he's made up by saying "Hang in there, buddy. Sorry I squeezed your arm. Hey, love ya." But Rick's words ring hollow, and we can see from the look of shocked recognition on Stanley's face that he now sees his father for what he is. The last we see of him, he's sprawled out drunkenly, insisting vainly that his son "Go to bed." "Things go round and round," reflects Thurston superciliously, just as Donnie laments the fate of "a man of genius who gets shit on as a child." But the most damaging examples extend beyond financial exploitation to sexual abuse.

The importance of a confession—whether forgiven or not—weighs heavily in Magnolia's psychodrama. Earl braves his shame in begging Phil to contact the estranged Frank; by the time Frank arrives, Earl is past speech—and when father and son finally look each other in the eyes, it's in helpless silence. Anderson isn't joking about the consequences of refusing to take responsibility for past sins. Jimmy Gator's fatal mistake is failing to confess that he molested his daughter. His wife, who is willing to forgive him his other transgressions, pleads with him, "Say it, Jimmy!"  "But I don't know what I've done," he stammers back. "You do!—but you won't say," Rose insists tearfully. She finally leaves him for Claudia, in whose living room hangs a painting with a tiny, defiant message taped along the lower edge, as though to reassure her of her own sanity: "but it did happen."

Even the severest failures of critical listening are less flagrant than officer Jim's deafness to Dixon, the 10-year-old rapper who persists mightily against barriers of dialect and condescension to deliver his message. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I don’t need to hear that word.” “I just told you who done it!” the boy protests. When Claudia proposes frank self-revelation—and tries to live up to it—Jim at first only hears her vulgarity. (This is the same Jim who tests Claudia for hearing loss by speaking behind his hand, warning "You're gonna damage your ears.")

Anderson, like the candid fiend in Chaucer's "The Friar's Tale," teaches us not to confuse a filthy tongue with a wicked heart. ("How come every word out of your mouth," Phil asks Earl, "is 'cocksucker,' 'shitballs,' or 'fuck'?"—before shrugging it off and helping him to make his way to a better death.) When Jim does recognize the precious opportunity Claudia's offering him he promises not to judge her and "to take everything at face value” [and] be a good listener." Then it's her turn to be afraid: "Ohhh I started this, didn't I? Didn't I? Fuck." Speaking the truth and getting it heard, however necessary, won't be easy. 

Difficulties in being understood multiply: Earl croaks through the twin impediments of his cancer and the drugs that alleviate it; Phil struggles awkwardly to reach Frank by telephone; Linda Partridge—after desperately confessing to all the men's cocks she's sucked—silences her lawyer's lame protest that adultery isn’t illegal, yelling at him to "Shut the fuck up!" (This isn’t the first time we’ve heard those words; they’re exactly what Sidney Barringer’s mother, in the frame narrative's third tale, screamed after discharging her shotgun at her husband, accidentally killing her son.) Meanwhile, her narcotized husband struggles to express his own awful remorse over an agonizing history of marital betrayal. Finally, in a moment of superb bathos, he mis-recalls the concluding couplet of “Abbey Road”: "And this is the regret that you make. The regret you make is—something that you take—blah, blah, blah."

Anderson genuinely respects efforts to remain honest and benevolent in the face of all the violence that, as Jim's duty commander tells him, is "the way of the world." Jim, who at first seems like a figure of fun, keeping up an earnest monologue as though he were being interviewed on Cops, is, at a closer look, sympathetic; we see him leaving the station house alone, while in the background all the other officers walk in pairs; we see him standing to one side, his comments ignored, as other officers take charge the crime scene he discovered. He decorates his apartment bedroom with a golfing poster to encourage him in his "DETERMINATION," a chess board, and a cross on the wall above the bed. He is that most unironic and unfashionable of characters: a decent man.

Critic after critic dismissed the radical courage of Jim and Claudia as a letdown, a failed payoff, an unrevealing revelation.  This kind of deafness symptomizes a current-day cultural gulf that dwarfs the one between material "haves" and "have-nots."  Call it the divide between the "deniers" and the "facers." The first group remain convinced that all of today's widespread manifestations of melancholy and alienation—substance abuse, stress- and fatigue-disorders, exploitation of children and neglect of the aged, escalating suicides—are best dismissed as the whining of "losers." To depict as much wretchedness in a film as Anderson does, whatever the nuances of detail and however complex the exploration of pattern and cause, is to indulge in pop-psych sentimentalism.

This loser-hating judgment is represented in the film itself by Frank. "Facing the past is an important way of not making progress," Frank declares to the truth-seeking Gwen, "That's something I tell my men over and over." Anderson disagrees. This is the same Frank who, confronted by Gwen with the facts of his own actual family history, first bluffs and feints, then sits out the rest of the interview in silent rage, "quietly judging" her. Stanley, having escaped WDKK? for his library-sanctuary, is seen once again studying alone at his table—but this time he's trying to learn about himself. He's reading about past prodigies—"the Arithmetician," "the Musical Infant," "the Wunderkind," "the Cleverest Child in the World"—thus bolstering himself to avoid repeating the prolonged tragedy of a Donnie Smith. In a final moment of maturity, Stanley wakes his father up to insist, "Dad, you need to be nicer to me.”

Officer Jim's final soliloquy speaks up, with appropriate modesty, both for non-judgmental self-understanding and for openly facing the suffering of others:

People think if I make a judgment call then it's a judgment on them, but that's not what I do and that's not what should be done. I have to take everything and play it as it lays. Sometimes people need a little help.  Sometimes people need to be forgiven and sometimes people need to go to jail. And that's a very tricky thing on my part, making that call. Can you forgive someone?  Well, that's the tough part. What do we forgive? Tough part of the job. Tough part of walking down the street.

The kind of maladies strewn across the low-lit heavily-shadowed interiors and the rain-darkened exteriors of Magnolia add up to significantly more than a random handful of individual morality plays. Inevitably, Magnolia's cultural critique targets the dynamics of convenience consumerism. Most often, as we all know, it's the carrot that draws us in. Stacked against the wall in the corner of Marcie's living room are a half-dozen coin-operated gum and candy vending dispensers, echoing the cheap, sweet gratifications of her drugs-and-prostitution drill. Frank advises his would be Seduce-and-Destroyers to track their sexual conquests on a calendar—"just 99 cents at your corner store." Show-biz savvy quiz-kids Richard and Julia urge Stanley to get an agent: "You could get a lot of stuff out of this. Endorsements and shit. Free things from people that want you to endorse their products. Commercials, a sitcom, a Movie of the Week." The ultimate, empty promise of this decrepit consumer utopia is voiced by Stanley's money-grubbing dad: "You get through this [show], I'll buy you anything you want."

But it's usually the stick that secures our compliance.  Before Donnie suffers through a tongue-lashing at the outlet where he works in sales, he first races through the showroom strewn with furniture and appliances while a Jiffy-Lube commercial berates him about the costs of neglected prevention—"If you don't maintain it, I'll be fixing it—and you don't wanna see me." Donnie's boss (the doubly-unwise Solomon Solomon) furiously invokes the bottom line of wage-slave contractualism: "I pay you!" (The company's first dollar is framed on the wall to Solomon's left.)

Sometimes though, we talk back, defending ourselves against advertising and against the false camaraderie of the commercial transaction. In one shot, Phil holds a cup of 7-ELEVEN coffee; moments earlier, Donnie drives his car through one of the franchise's plate-glass windows. Linda Partridge fills her prescriptions at the A-to-Z Pharmacy—which displays on its bags a phony pledge of "Courtesy and Service"—but then ends her exchange with two intrusive druggists by screaming at them "SHAME ON YOU! SHAME ON BOTH OF YOU!" 

The stresses of such alienating exchanges, more often than not, add up to sickness and death. Prompted by the dying Earl's request that he track down his son, Phil must negotiate an obstacle course of low-rent mass media and unhelpful phone clerks before he makes contact with Frank. Phil's appeal goes forward only when he learns that one of the unhelpful phone clerks, Chad's, mother had suffered from breast cancer. She's fine for now—unlike Earl and Jimmy, whose tumorous lungs and brain, and metastasized bones, respectively, are killing them. Both men are smokers, and one of those insidiously alluring "Newport—Alive with Pleasure" billboards is visible just before the frogs begin to fall.

How these old hacks die mirrors the social depravity of TV-sponsored lives. "A dying wish. So boring. An old man on a bed," Earl sneers, despising the very wish-for-forgiveness soap opera cliche his death is playing out. Jimmy, struck down by a frog, falls senseless to the ground, his gun blasting a TV screen and sparking a fire that will consume him. Aristotle warned that a human life can't be judged happy until it's over, but few works of drama since Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI have lingered as long over the death throes of the powerful and corrupt as does Magnolia. The affluence, the celebrity, the philandering, the aversion to being present when women are suffering, and most of all the absurd pretension to authority—all these mark Jimmy and Earl as the "Alpha males" who conservative culture asks us to see as winners and to desire as leaders. 

But Magnolia, in its single most life-affirming insight, invites us to shed this nonsense as the dog-pack cowardice it is. Old men like these—forever excoriated by artists for sending the young to fight and die in their stead, for fucking defenseless boys and girls, and for hoarding scarce resources to finance their mercenaries and harems—can't die too thoroughly steeped in disgrace. Near the opening of the film, we see Claudia being fucked by a 40-something bar pick-up and then her father Jimmy fucking a showgirl. The pairing of these scenes prepares us for the later revelation that he is just one more father who molested his daughter. And the same exploitative and dehumanizing dynamic extends from the treatment of children to that of women when Earl belatedly confesses cheating on Lily "over and over because I wanted to be a man, and I couldn't let her be a woman, a smart, free person who was something."

Anderson's cultural critique thus begins with the street-level indecencies of consumerism, and ends on the panicked deathbeds of the brutal capitalist patriarchs who've profited most obscenely from it. Earl's pool and patio overflow with a density of falling and fallen frogs seen nowhere else. When a frog falls through the skylight of Jimmy's kitchen and knocks aside the pistol he's already pressed to his temple, this is an intervention. The implication is clear: unlike the genuinely remorseful Craig Hansen of the frame narrative's Lake Tahoe sequence, the unshriven Jimmy isn't good enough to die from a clean shot. For his failure to repent, Jimmy Gator must burn.

So what about those frogs? Surely their downpour is a traditional judgment, straight out of scripture? Magnolia’s most explicit reference to “Exodus” 8:2 appears on a sign held by a member of the studio-audience at WDKK? (where it's immediately confiscated and carried away). But the numbers 8 and 2 are on display again and again in the opening frame narrative of the film: a placard with the number 82 bounces on the chest of one of the three men hanged for the Greenberry Hill murder; volunteer firefighter Craig Hansen's plane features an "82" just beside the cockpit; "All you need is a deuce" blackjack dealer Delmer Darion tells Hansen at the Reno casino table—"That is an eight," Hansen angrily replies; it's 8:20PM when the American Association of Forensic Science meets to hear Dr. Donald Harper discuss the Barringer suicide/homicide—and then the numbers 8 and 2, in coils of rope, are visible on the rooftop wall from which Sydney is seen jumping to "be with God." Early in the central narrative, these numbers again recur: replies to Jim Kurring's phone-date recording should be sent to "Box 82," and the chance of rain in the first weather-forecast title is announced with implausible precision as 82%. Explicit references to the film Exodus are clustered near the Magnolia Boulevard intersection where the rain of frogs begins:  a large poster lights up on a bus-stop shelter (beneath neon signs advertising banking, check-cashing, photo-developing, and nail-painting services). The abused and exploited children of Magnolia arguably constitute a modern-day chosen people in need of liberation from longtime oppressors (as quiz-kid Donnie insists: "No, it is not dangerous to confuse children with angels”).

However, the plague of frogs that Moses called up didn’t rain down from the heavens but “came up” from the Nile. Magnolia's rain of frogs is drawn not from the Bible, but from the mass of anomalous phenomena recorded in the writings of the American iconoclast Charles Fort. Fort published four volumes between 1919 and 1932 describing conventionally inexplicable events he'd found reported in the back files of every scientific journal, popular science magazine, and newspaper on which he could lay his hands in the New York Public Library and the British Museum. Fort's singular compilations were the yield of a sedentary life shared with a small circle of friends, his existence marked by few distinctive patterns of behavior—with the single exception of having spent nearly every evening at the movies. Prominent among the books appearing on the library table in front of child-genius Stanley, such as Unusual Natural Phenomena and Our Changing Weather, is Fort's last work, Wild Talents. Charles Fort's registers of marvels are linked to the floating island of Magonia (the title, not coincidentally, of a current British journal of all things Fortean). Magnolia”s frogs rain not from any heaven, either Old Testament or New, but from the folkloric origins of signs and wonders. A concern with the conventionally inexplicable is established early on in the film with the frame narrative of three events that are "not just 'Something That Happened,'" that cannot be merely "One of Those Things," or "Just A Matter of Chance."

Further confirming Anderson's interest in the marvelous is his use of Ricky Jay as the voice of the unnamed narrator.  Jay (who also plays Burt Ramsey, a producer for WDKK?) is one of the world's greatest living magicians and experts on anomalous phenomena. His book Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women is another of the titles visible on Stanley's desk, and he is also responsible for the quarterly publication Jay's Journal of Anomalies. Jay returns briefly as the narrator in Magnolia's closing minutes when the central narrative's extraordinary complexity of layered effects is behind us, first to recall the frame's "stories of coincidence and chance and intersections and strange things told," and then to remark that "We generally say, 'Well if that was in a movie, I wouldn't believe it.'"

This, it seems fair to suppose, is not something Charles Fort was ever heard to say, and Jay invites us to join in tempering our conventional skepticism with a greater humility: "It is [my] humble opinion that these strange things happen all the time." Phil pleads with the telephone operator that “The reason they put those scenes in movies is that this is something that really happens. This is the scene where you help me.” Young Stanley echoes them, in ecstasy and awe, as the frogs fall in shadowy slow-motion silhouette behind him: "This is something that happens." We’ve seen the hero of Magnolia, Jim Kurring (like Fort, a movie-lover), at his most desperate, panicked over the loss of his police-issue revolver, the glare from his flashlight fracturing in the pouring rain as he cries "Lord, please help me find the gun." When his revolver is returned to him from the sky, landing just a few yards away from where he huddles after rescuing Donnie from the rain of frogs, Jim looks—but can scarcely credit the evidence of things clearly seen. This is the most urgent, secret truth of “Magnolia”: that this world is full of wonders, that miracles are possible, that such things really do happen.

And the rarest and most mysterious of miracles is not a spectacular rain of frogs or uncanny coincidence, but the alchemy of human transformation. These less showy marvels are the sorts of movie cliches that Earl scorns—men begging forgiveness on their deathbeds, sons and daughters refusing forgiveness, or grudgingly granting it, cynical gold-diggers falling unexpectedly in love, people showing kindness to strangers, lovers being true to one another. This is the final level of Magnolia—the spiritual, which for Anderson means the possibility of salvation. Not surprisingly in a film of such aesthetic intelligence, its superimposition upon the personal and cultural layers simultaneously unifies them.

The characters in this film whom Anderson loves best—Linda, Stanley, Jim, and especially Claudia—are less like martyrs than like spiritual barometers. They're the most vulnerable among us, those whose susceptibility to damage forecasts our culture's accelerating self-destruction. They're like the frogs that famously serve as a bellwether species, their sensitive membranes exposing them early on to displays of mutation and disease, which in turn signify an erosion of resources and an accretion of toxins.  The threatened ruin of characters like Claudia foretells a far wider and more catastrophic spiritual dissolution.

It's Dixon, the young black rapper whose cell-phone call to 911 rescues Linda from her attempted suicide, who also speaks most explicitly for Magnolia's spiritual level. The opening line in Dixon's prophecy alerts us to multiple layers of meaning:

Presence—with a double ass meaning

Gifts I bestow

With my riff, and my flow

But you can't hear me though

Think fast, catch me, yo

Cause I throw what I know

With a Resonance

Check that ego—Come off it

I'm the prophet, the professor

I'ma teach you 'bout the worm

Who eventually turned

To catch wreck with the neck

Of a longtime oppressor

If it's worth being hurt

It's worth bringing pain in

When the sunshine don't work

The Good Lord bring the rain in.

At the street level, the Worm (who comes out in the rain) is Marcie's son, the killer of Porter Parker (the old white man Jim finds dead in her bedroom closet)—and also the thief who runs off with Jim's revolver. But the worm who turns is also the worm that awaits us all, not only as individuals, but as a culture, and a species. Magnolia is, as Anderson promised, “the mother of all movies about the Valley”—the valley of the shadow of death.

The unpredictable weather of Magnolia warns us to take up our chancy opportunity for cleansing: immediately after one title card forecasts "Light Showers," the Good Lord's rain slashes down on Rick and Stanley as they hurry into the studio. Stanley's direct interest in such strange events is highlighted when he inquires of Cynthia whether the TV studio's "weather people use outside meteorological services or have in-house instruments?" The tears shed by Frank end hopefully, with his ambivalent forgiveness of his father ("Don't go, you fucking asshole," he sobs at Earl's bedside) and with his reconciliation visit to Linda as she recovers in the hospital from her suicide attempt. But the only characters seen truly getting clean in this film are Jim and Claudia, whose morning shower and pre-date shower, respectively, are both shot through the pebbled glass of shower-stall doors.  The connection they establish, with Jim affirming their deal to tell all the painful truths, thus enabling him to see Claudia as "a good, beautiful person," is the clearest example we have of hope for a wider awakening. Out of the cleansing tears and streaming rain, we glimpse the difficult path to a future good.

Paul Thomas Anderson leaves us, at the end of a film full of anguished intensity, with the image of its most desperately suffering victim, Claudia, surprised in a quick but joyous smile. It is a radiant image, like the little girl on the beach smiling wistfully out at we jaded viewers at the end of La Dolce Vita, or the star child’s enigmatic gaze turning out towards us at the end of 2001; like the former, it’s an image of lost innocence beckoning across a gulf, and, like the latter, of the possibility of evolution and change.

Reviewed by Rob Content, Tim Kreider, and Boyd White
08.24.02