Word: magnolia
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...crosscutting is not a device or a crutch; Magnolia is, in fact, Anderson's most ambitious and assured film to date because he operates without imposing the distance of Hard Eight's hidden motivations or Boogie Nights' campy ludicrousness. There is neither disdain nor caricature in the way he nakedly reveals each character's fear, sentimentality, and clumsy attempts at revelation and renewal...
...part of the stubborn old grump, is truly great here, shading Earl Partridge with the lowing regret and pained self-knowledge of a man acutely aware that his end is nearing. Two-thirds through the film, he delivers a soliloquy that tragically articulates the pall hovering over all of Magnolia's characters, and as he moans his words of warning, we can sense him clutching the pieces of his broken heart. Also moving is young Blackman, who wears the forlornness of game show prodigy Stanley Spector like the best of character actors, depicting impeccably the angst of a child sequestered...
...Magnolia's faithfulness to the surreal irregularity and aimlessness of life is what distinguishes it from its nearest relative, Robert Altman's Short Cuts. Where that film found black social satire in forcing its inhabitants' to collide in a series of chance events, Magnolia opts for an intimate and studied portrait of each of its nine focal characters by allowing their suffering to be its own dramatic vehicle. Nonetheless, Anderson is a cinephile, and he is indebted here, as in all of his work, to other distinctive and established filmmakers, Altman especially. This film bears some obvious resemblance to Short...
...attempts at concluding thematic uniformity among the various stories are confounded by Magnolia's desire to let the characters develop naturally and with the complexity of their construction. Their pursuits of love and redemption are echoed plaintively in the music of Aimee Mann, which is interwoven throughout the film and which, in one disarmingly effective scene, assumes a lead role. But the music, too, is simply a bittersweet tribute to modern and everyday insecurities; it's as if Anderson feels so intensely what it is to be alive today that he can't help but burst into song. Which...
...features, Hard Eight and Boogie Nights. His acceptance into Hollywood pictures is a recent development, having begun with last year's baseball romance For Love of the Game continuing with Wolfgang Peterson's upcoming tragedy at sea, The Perfect Storm, also starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. In Magnolia, Reilly's third collaboration with Anderson, his Officer Jim Kurring is the film's moral center and allows the actor to deliver the most honest and deeply felt performance of his film career...