Magnolia

For a long time now, Magnolia has been one of those movies I've always been meaning to see because it earned both critical acclaim and a fair share of "WTF?" reactions from many of my peers. I figured it was some kind of confusing movie on the surface rife with underlying meanings. Whenever people complained about the absurdly biblical ending (spoiler alert: it rains frogs) I always imagined that had to be foreshadowed throughout the film in some meaningful way. Well, I finally did see Magnolia last night, and I have to say... "WTF?" Don't get me wrong. This nearly-three-hour movie kept me intrigued and entertained, which I guess is all a movie is supposed to do, but after it ended - and even after sleeping on it and poking around on the Internet for the opinions of others - I can't say I have any real idea what the point of the movie (or the climactic amphibian downpour, for that matter) was. There's an ensemble cast of characters, and they're all connected in certain ways ranging from employer-employee relationships to familial ties. And these characters are all looking for happiness or closure or love or something similar, and most of them mingle or cross paths with most of the others in some way, and some find what they're looking for and others don't, and then it rains frogs. And in a closing paragraph, a narrator asks us to consider whether or not certain things that happen are coincidental, or something more. And that's that. Again, I didn't hate it, wasn't bored by it, and don't regret seeing it. But man, do I have no idea what it's all supposed to "mean" or "do." Was it supposed to elicit certain emotional reactions in me? Was it supposed to just be a collection of smaller simple personal stories that intersect? Did it rain frogs in some sort of biblical symbolism, or was that an intentionally cheap deus ex machina trick thrown into the script with a wink? The other two Paul Thomas Anderson movies I've seen - Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood - were also fairly vague at times, but the former resonated with me emotionally as a love story and character study, and the latter was just an excellent biopic about a ruthless American capitalist. Magnolia? I dunno. I've got nothing. It seemed like Crash in that it was just sort of a collection of small interconnected stories, but in Crash there was a common underlying theme of racism in America. Magnolia had no such unifying feel to it, and instead just looked at a whole bunch or people struggle with mostly minor personal demons. In that regard, it very much felt like the late '90s film it was. Is it just me, or was 1999 just something of a year-long self-aware feel-good party in America? The economy was great, there were no real foreign conflicts to fear, the new millennium was coming, and it was time to let the good times roll. The biggest box office hits were psychological pieces rather than historical biopics or war films. We all turned our observations inward and looked at American society at the turn of the millennium. Fight Club. American Beauty. Being John Malkovich. The Sixth Sense. The Matrix. Office Space. So much focus on "man vs. self" rather than "us vs. them." So many commentaries on how shallow and vapid our society had become. You just didn't see movies like these, at least dominating so much of pop culture all at once, after 1999. Soon the millennial party was over and it was time to get back to focusing on the future instead of taking an in-depth look at our culture as it currently stood. September 11th, a pair of wars, a pair of recessions, and some sobering natural disasters and bubble collapses later, we're much more jaded. It's all about the day-to-day grind. We're no longer interested in taking a deeper look at the holes beneath the superficially perfect American lifestyle because the American lifestyle is so clearly no longer even superficially perfect. No, don't show me a movie where a man is unhappy because he has some daddy issues. Show me Batman saving a fictional city. Show me a man cutting his own arm off with a pocket knife in order to survive. Show me a planet full of blue catlike people, and let me watch them defend their home from an invasion. Show me a social outcast who becomes a billionaire because his website became an Internet sensation. These days we want inspiration, not introspection. We want protagonists to succeed, not to defeat themselves. Our thematic content of choice has collectively gone from "find meaning and purpose in your life" to "live and get by for another day." (Whew. Lengthy ramble. Sorry, it happens from time to time.) Anyway, maybe some of the deeper meaning or beauty of Magnolia was lost on me because its already dated and no longer relevant. If I was supposed to share the anguish of once character when, say, he peed his pants on national television (no, really, that happened), I didn't. I kind of laughed at him and at his situation. And maybe I was supposed to. Again, I'm not really sure what it was Magnolia was trying to do or say. And not because the plot was vague or hard to follow. If anything, it was overly easy and straightforward. Mundane, even. I dunno. I'm running out of coherent things to say about Magnolia, but I feel no closer to really describing or exploring it than I did when I began this post. So what about you, fellow bloggers and dear readers? Did you ever see Magnolia, and if so, what the hell was it all about anyway? I concede the floor to the rest of you.