Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia runs 189 minutes and follows a dying father, a young wife, a male caretaker, a famous lost son, a police officer in love, a boy genius, an ex-boy genius, a game show host and an estranged daughter through one day in the San Fernando Valley. The stories look separate. They are not. It is an epic about people hunting happiness, forgiveness and meaning, and it refuses to hand any of them an easy answer.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
Jimmy Gator and the Boy on the Show
Jimmy Gator hosts a quiz show called What Do Kids Know?, pitting children against adults. He is dying of cancer. Stanley Spector, the show’s newest child prodigy, gets hounded by his father Rick for the prize money and belittled by the grown-ups, who block him from a bathroom break during a commercial. Stanley wets himself on air.
Jimmy, drunk, collapses mid-show and orders the production to continue. Rick berates his son. Stanley runs.
That stretch is the film’s argument in miniature. The adults take, the children pay, and the cameras never stop. Stanley is not a character so much as a bill someone else is collecting.
Frank T.J. Mackey and the Father Who Left
Earl Partridge, the show’s former producer, is dying of cancer faster than Jimmy. His trophy wife, Linda, gathers his prescriptions while a nurse, Phil Parma, tends him. Earl asks Phil to track down his estranged son, Frank Mackey.
Frank is a charismatic but blatantly misogynistic motivational speaker and pickup artist. A journalist who knows Frank nursed his dying mother after Earl walked out interviews him. Frank storms off. Phil keeps trying to reach him.
Tom Cruise plays Frank, and the part is the film’s sharpest instrument. Anderson built the character partly from an audio recording made in an engineering class taught by a friend, in which two men talked trash about women and quoted a man named Ross Jeffries. Anderson transcribed the tape, read it with John C. Reilly and Chris Penn, and folded that dialogue into Mackey’s sex seminar.
Cruise was a fan of Anderson’s Boogie Nights and reached out while Anderson worked on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. They met on that set, and Cruise told him to keep him in mind. Anderson sent the finished script. Cruise called the next day, interested but nervous. A meeting with Cruise and De Luca helped convince him.
Anderson shot a full-length infomercial with Cruise and bought late-night television time to air it. That is not a marketing footnote. It is the same trick the film plays on its audience: the huckster gets a real platform.
Jim Kurring, Claudia, and Donnie Smith
Los Angeles police officer Jim Kurring investigates a disturbance at a woman’s apartment and finds a body in a closet. Dixon, a neighborhood boy, tries to tell him who did it and fails. Jim then visits the apartment of Claudia Wilson, whose neighbors called police after she fought with Jimmy, her estranged father, and blasted music while snorting cocaine. Jim seems oblivious. He asks her on a date.
Former What Do Kids Know? champion Donnie Smith, whose parents took all his prize money, has been fired and is in love with a male bartender with braces. Donnie wants braces himself, thinking the bartender will love him back. He plans to steal money from his former boss for the surgery.
These are not subplots. They are one story at different volumes: people used up young, still trying to buy their way back.
The Numbers Behind the Film
Magnolia opened in limited release through New Line Cinema on December 17, 1999, then went wide on January 7, 2000. It grossed $48.4 million against a $37 million budget. It took three nominations at the 72nd Academy Awards, where Cruise was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and two at the 57th Golden Globes, where Cruise won Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture.
It placed third in the National Board of Review’s top ten films of the year and won three National Board of Review Awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Philip Seymour Hoffman and Best Supporting Actress for Julianne Moore. Its soundtrack and score earned a cumulative three nominations at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| December 17, 1999 | Limited theatrical release by New Line Cinema |
| January 7, 2000 | Wide expansion |
| 72nd Academy Awards | Three nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for Tom Cruise |
| 57th Golden Globes | Two nominations; Cruise won Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture |
| 43rd Annual Grammy Awards | Three cumulative nominations for soundtrack and score |
Key facts
- Runtime: 189 minutes
- Genre: Drama
- Budget: $37 million
- Gross: $48.4 million
- Rotten Tomatoes: 82%
- Clay Tribune score: 8.2/10
What Holds and What Sags
The script was inspired by the music of Aimee Mann, who contributed several songs to the soundtrack. That origin shows. Magnolia behaves like a song cycle: characters enter, repeat, and resolve into one another rather than into a plot.
Jason Robards plays Earl in his final film role. He said of the character, “It was sort of prophetic that I be asked to play a guy going out in life. It was just so right for me to do this and bring what I k—” The thought is unfinished in the record, and that is fitting. Robards could not originally take the role because of a staph infection. George C. Scott declined it. Robards took it.
The flaws are real. At 189 minutes, the film spends time on characters who do not earn their minutes, and the interconnectedness can feel like a design rather than a discovery. But the performances hold. Cruise is the revelation, Hoffman and Moore are the anchors, and the refusal to resolve these people cleanly is the point.
Magnolia is not a puzzle to solve. It is a long look at people failed early and still standing in the rain. It is worth the time.
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