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Magnolia
Director : Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast : Jason Robards, Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Melora Walters
(New Line Cinema, 1999) Rated: R by Todd Ramlow
Interview with Paul Thomas Anderson
director of Magnolia another review of ... by Cynthia Fuchs My Favorite Flower As Academy Award nomination season rolls around, I hope that Paul Thomas Anderson's absolutely brilliant Magnolia receives the accolades that it so richly deserves. The pedestrian tastes which seem so dear to the Academy, however, nearly ensure that Magnolia will be eclipsed by that other flowery feature of 1999, American Beauty . Where American Beauty (TM) serves up the perfumed, FTD'd, standardized, suburban banalities of its floral namesake, Magnolia 's flowery secrets unfold in a lugubrious decadence, evoke a gothic aesthetic, and dizzy with a narcotic attar. While American Beauty is visually impressive, Magnolia is simply, and entirely, astounding. Anderson's film is a multi-layered, richly textured, daring and innovative piece of filmmaking that defies easy explanation. Simple plot exposition does not do the film justice. On a very basic level, Magnolia is a family drama in the grand and pathos-driven tradition of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. Like Williams and O'Neill's plays, which broke out of the limits of "family drama" to become philosophical excursuses on human conditions and influences of the past | |
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