And Then It Rained Frogs: Why "Magnolia" is Every Bit as Audacious and Amazing 15 Years Later

Remembering the power of "Magnolia," Paul Thomas Anderson's most challenging film.

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The inevitable result of burgeoning pressure is the rupture of whatever holds it. With his sprawling 1999 epic Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson mounts pressure through a series of intertwined stories, then presses the release valve on the tension in dramatic fashion. Though remarkable coincidence is a prominent theme in the film, the notion that certain occurrences happen because they need to is its resounding message.

Released at peak Y2K paranoia, Magnolia is a remarkably challenging piece of filmmaking from a director and writer still in his 20s. While flawed, it’s the product of a visionary who aimed high and struck his target and, more important, an emotional chord with viewers. Anderson may have created better films since (including his latest, the gonzo comedy Inherent Vice), but this one prevails as an exceptionally ambitious project and a brilliant character study.

Magnolia is a gripping, emotionally charged story about the dark side of the Valley orchestrated by someone more familiar with it than most. Anderson is a child of the Valley. Even as an adult, it remains his playground, and he wrote these characters so convincingly because he knows them. His writing displays an astute grasp of human nature. Rather than simply focus on who the characters are, Magnolia explores the motivating factors which make them that way. While coincidence looms over the project as the overarching message, the film echoes how the despicable actions of adults damage children irreparably.

Claudia Wilson Gator (Melora Walters) resorts to drugs and promiscuity due to implied sexual abuse at the hands of her father, What Do Kids Know? host Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall). Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) masquerades as a laughably sexist motivational speaker (the "Respect the cock" scene is both pathetic and amazing) due to a burning hatred for his estranged father, Earl Partridge (Jason Robards​, in his final film appearance), who left him to care for his dying mother as a teenager. Quiz Kid Donnie Smith’s (William H. Macy) parents spent all of the money he won on What Do Kids Know?, and he flails through adulthood as an underemployed alcoholic. Current prodigy Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackmon) is pushed so hard by a father (Michael Bowen) who treats him like a golden ticket, he’s likely to end up just like Smith—or worse.

Anderson’s deep understanding of his characters allowed him to coax performances out of his cast which remain outstanding. Three in particular truly stand out. John C. Reilly plays Officer Jim Kurring, the film’s moral compass. "You can forgive someone," he says during the final minutes. "Well, that’s the tough part. What can we forgive?" That question is as salient to the entire film as it is Kurring’s character. The late Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Phil Parma, the dying Partridge’s nurse, in a minor, yet important role. He spends the majority of the film trying to fulfill a remorseful Patridge’s final wish of being reunited with the son he abandoned.

One particular performance, though, reigns supreme: Tom Cruise’s nuanced turn as that abandoned son. With his douchebag hairstyle, wristband, suffocatingly-tight leather vest, and revolting rhetoric, Frank T.J. Mackey hides behind a veil of woman-hating bravado. Mackey's entire persona is a defense mechanism, concealing a vulnerable boy whose father deserted him and his cancer-stricken mother. Cruise has never been more misogynistic, conflicted, or better.

Mackey sobbing uncontrollably while his father lay on his deathbed is the film’s most powerful scene:

It’s impossible to discuss Magnolia without addressing the elephant frogs in the room. As character’s emotions reach their peak, the Valley is blanketed with a downpour of live amphibians, the most extreme pathetic fallacy imaginable. As the young Dixon (Emmanuel Johnson) informs Jim through rhyme, "When the sunshine don’t work, the good Lord bring the rain in." The characters basked in the California sun, their pasts literally or physically eating away at them like cancer. It took this extraordinary moment for them to finally confront their problems.

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Frogs aside, Anderson layers the film with something else that's even more crucial: a perfectly calibrated soundtrack. He excels at incorporating music into his films, but it’s never meant more to the plot than it did in Magnolia. The "Wise Up" sequence is a chorus-like moment that doesn’t disrupt the narrative flow because it arrives like a musical epiphany for each character.

Whereas "Wise Up" is the introspective calm before the storm, Aimee Mann’s "Save Me," written specifically for the film, is a cry for help. However, it also represents a bright spot amidst the chaos, closing the film as the kind-hearted Jim rescues Claudia from her downward spiral with love—the one thing no man has given her. The lyrics "You look like a perfect fit/For a girl in need of a tourniquet" describe their budding relationship perfectly, and Anderson’s decision to have the music directly align with the action endures as genius.

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Magnolia is like a chapter from the Old Testament of the Bible, back when God had to resort to extremes to teach lessons. It’s not as taut or tidy as Boogie Nights or There Will Be Blood, the latter of which is arguably Anderson’s greatest work. Yet only in a conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson’s films will the movies about the porn and oil industries not be the most controversial.

To this day, Magnolia is the rare film that can make you run the full gamut of emotions before smiling like Claudia does in its final moment.

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