Clocking in at 3 hours and 11 minutes, the first half of Paul Thomas Anderson's follow-up to "Boogie Nights" is ambitious, engaging, and risky. Sadly, the remainder of the film is self-indulgent, infantile, maddening, and, ultimately, an assult on one's senses like nothing you've ever experienced before.
Basically a pastiche of several intersecting stories in Los Angeles, Magnolia recounts a day in the lives of earnest cop John C. Reilly, woman-hating television Svengali Tom Cruise, cancer-ridden game show icon Philip Baker Hall, his wife Melinda Dillon, his daughter Melora Walters, cancer-ridden and dying television magnate Jason Robards, his mentally ill wife Julianne Moore, Robard's nurse Philip Seymour Hoffman, game show child wunderkind Jeremy Blackmon, his father Michael Bowen, and former game show child wunderkind William H. Macy.
The first problem is structural. Anderson has chosen a story with countless characters who are at the point of a knife in their lives. Drug abuse, fear of dying, dying itself, mental illness, abandonment . . . these are but a few of the issues confronting these characters. As such, scene after scene of high-pitched melodrama makes for a trying time.
