Magnolia

I’ve always had a great deal of respect for Paul Thomas Anderson, but it’s never really amounted to much more than that. Formally, his films are flawless. When you look at them in immediacy, you would be very hard-pressed to find many, if any errors. To a degree this even extends to his screenplays. But I’ve also found that there is this certain barrier that shrouds his films in disconnect. He is so efficient that he almost neglects the one thing that a film is meant to do: make you feel. Make you feel or make you think or leave some impression upon you. He makes these films with meticulous and immensely beautiful photography, edited regardfully with extreme intelligence, and with consistently perfect performances. Yet despite all of this, I’ve never really found that this has been used to facilitate the amount of substance that it should. There’s a certain hollowness in his films which has never really allowed him to enter the realm of true cinematic genius that he is certainly capable of entering. He has plenty of great films, plenty of masterpieces even, but no one film that ever breaks that ceiling.  Magnolia is that one film. It’s a perfect film for Anderson. In Magnolia, the filmmaking, the structure, the editing, is in itself a character in many ways. Whilst in his other endeavours, the filmmaking estranges substance, in Magnolia, the filmmaking is the substance. This film is quite literally perfect. Everything that makes Paul Thomas Anderson a genius in aestheticism is used to facilitate genius in art itself. This has the singular most ambitious screenplay I’ve ever encountered, but it’s balanced and somehow manages not to overextend itself or get lost. It’s simply perfect; absurd and abstract but not at all silly or bemusing. 1999 is a strange year in cinema, because as the last year of the twentieth century and the last year of the second millennium, I think a certain constant can be observed in the year’s films. There’s a series of definitive works centred on what it means to live in America in the twentieth century under capitalism and commercialism; reflections on a century, reflections on a millennium at its tail end. Eyes Wide Shut, American Beauty, Fight Club, and now Magnolia.