Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson)

"There are stories of coincidence and chance, of intersections and strange things told, and which is which and who only knows? And we generally say, "Well, if that was in a movie, I wouldn't believe it." Someone's so-and-so met someone else's so-and-so and so on. And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time.”

Following the trail blazed by American pioneer Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson helped popularize a peculiar subgenre, the ensemble drama with intersecting storylines. Three subsequent Oscar winners used a similar canvas to explore the scope of a particular issue (Traffic: drugs; Crash: prejudice Babel: language). In Anderson’s Magnolia the means are ends in themselves. An energetic opening montage, coupled with voice-over narration, recreates a series of unbelievable yet factual stories. Not content to tell a story with an implausible plot, Magnolia aspires to tell a story about implausibility itself. Patterns emerge as the camera follows the simultaneous melodramas of a double-digit collection of characters. Seemingly everyone’s life is filled with suffering and regret. These people are not only similar, but in a sense they become one unified character, wrestling with terminal cancer, drug abuse, marital infidelity, and child cruelty from every angle. This person also screams out so many curses from the cradle to the grave, that a diagnosis of Tourette syndrome might be appropriate. Each cast member exercises his vocal cords and flexes his emotive muscles. Two hours after the audacious opening sequence, Anderson makes another bold creative decision to use music to highlight their interconnectedness. Another half hour later, he becomes even bolder by manipulating the weather, almost with the divine hand of fate. This nonstop barrage of human misery, punctuated by these instances of the filmmaker’s bravado, either elevates itself to masterpiece status or collapses under its own ambitions (depending upon your perspective).