Magnolia (1999)
About halfway through watching this trailer for the first time in a theater, I turned to my buddy Ken and said “Okay, I’m already exhausted.” He concurred. We ended up going to the movie anyway. When it was finally done with us, we staggered out into the December evening. “Well?” Ken said. “It makes Boogie Nights look like a model of concision,” I muttered. “Yup,” Ken said, and sighed.
I’m not saying Paul Thomas Anderson is or was a cokehead. I am saying that he writes and directs like one, especially in Magnolia. Good God, what a sprawling farrago of brilliance and nonsense. I’m on record as having a rather lukewarm and impatient initial response to the flick, but parts of it nag at me to this very day. It’s precisely this breed of baffling, overarching, emotionally emetic colossus that gets talked about, thought about, for years.
With its eyes shut tight and its fingers crossed — how the hell do we sell this heffalump to the popcorn-chewers? — a nervously optimistic New Line unleashed this trailer, which whip-pans its way across what seem like dozens of characters addressing us directly. I don’t know that I could psych myself up for the entire three-hour-and-eight-minute Magnolia ride again, but I could watch the trailer all day. Whoever cut the trailer together should’ve cut the movie. Disjointed yet alluring images — a quiz show? a cop? a bed-ridden Jason Robards? — quarrel with Aimee Mann’s “Momentum” (“And I know life is getting shorter/I can’t bring myself to set the scene/Even when it’s approaching torture/I’ve got my routine”) for our attention.
It’s a dazzling mini-movie, compressed angst and vituperation and exaltation. Then Jon Brion’s instrumental arrives, announcing the film’s importance, and the trailer gets a bit up itself: “Things fall down. People look up.” [Montage of people looking up!] “And when it rains, it pours.” The final saving grace, though: the shot of John C. Reilly peering at something with his flashlight, and the Tom Cruise bit, which seems to acknowledge that the trailer really hasn’t done a very good job of telling you much about the film’s story, though it has evoked the flick’s subway-train rush of emotions.
In between those, of course, is a stark title card that, for the movie’s overseer, is the most important detail of all: “A P.T. Barnum Anderson Picture.” Yes, there’s a sucker — or easily impressed film critic — born every minute. I stood with the philistines on this one, though, as I said, this P.T. Anderson Picture doesn’t depart the memory without a fight, and it’s roughly equal parts dynamic stuff and crapola. The trailer reminds me of the good stuff, and makes a part of me want to spin the DVD, until I remember how I felt actually sitting through the whole damnable thing.
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