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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 17, 1999)
e may be through with the past, but H the past isn’t through with us” is a ||| line uttered by several characters in > Magnolia, the new film by director P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights). The film’s dozen or so characters, all residents of Los Angeles’ suburban San Fernando Valley, are trying, each in his own way, to erase, outrun, atone for or live up to the past. Magnolia follows these people through con fessions of marital infidelity, memories of emo tional and physical childhood abuse, unrequit ed love, drug addiction, suicide attempts and death. It may sound bleak, but Anderson depicts his characters’ stark, sometimes embar rassing pain with empathy, their awkwardness with grace. It’s a complete experience, acknowledging both the terrifying darkness and the redemptive light that can touch a human life. Each member of the sprawling ensemble cast is dazzling. Tom Cruise is a deeply wound ed, misogynistic men’s movement guru; Jason Robards is his estranged, dying father; and the always exhilarating Julianne Moore is Robards’ much younger wife, a shakily despondent woman who has as many regrets as her fatally ill husband. Phillip Seymour Hoffman (who played the trans woman in Flawless) is superbly subtle in his portrayal of Robards’ nurse, a per son whose unadulterated decency is shown not through pious clichés, but through his unself conscious, deep involvement with his patient’s illness and family. Elsewhere, William H. Macy (Fargo) plays a depressed gay man who, trapped in a dead-end job and a dead-end life, looks back with a sense of failure on his childhood years as a star on a long-running game show called “What Do Kids Know?” which featured high-IQ children com peting with adults for cash prizes. He spends much time and energy on a sweet, dorky, hope- $ W; |l less scheme to attract a hunky bartender. His homosexuality is a nonissue; his very real, human longing, his frustration and disappoint ment fit seamlessly with that of the other char acters. A complementary story line involves a child genius browbeaten by his father into suc cess as a present-day “What Do Kids Know?” contestant. In what are perhaps the most moving scenes in Magnolia, two unlikely people—an extremely strait-laced, well-meaning cop and a broken, angry cocaine addict—recognize each other’s peculiar loneliness and fall in love. To see these people’s halting steps over the false barriers that society, propriety and fear of rejec tion have placed between them is wrenching and, in the end, deeply gratifying. To call Magnolia “quirky” would be patroniz ing, but the film is gorgeously odd. At one point, time stops as the characters, still embroiled in their own narratives, are joined together in a song—they sing one line each, in turn. Not long after that, frogs mysteriously rain from the sky, flooding the city. What could easily have seemed pretentious is instead a cin ematic wake-up call to reality; Magnolia rightly maintains that “weird” is relative, and that the singularity or strangeness of an event makes it no less credible or real. “But it did happen,” a line of text shown in close-up tells us. “Things like this happen. This really happens,” a child repeats to himself in awe as he watches the deluge of frogs from his window. After overdoing the technique and skimp ing on the substance in Boogie Nights, Ander son demonstrates absolute, judicious mastery of the medium with Magnolia. The many story lines are perfectly realized, emotionally pitch perfect, and flow easily together, aided by Anderson’s frankly amazing technical prowess. Although the film clocks in at three hours and 15 minutes, there’s not a single wasted moment Many great movies have bravely shown us “the truth," the often painful physical and mental circumstances of Real Life, something that rarely exists in Hollywood films. With Magnolia, Anderson uncompromisingly shows us “the truth,” but he goes one step further to reveal the sometimes ridiculously simple things that help people survive it. Magnolia’s affirma tion of life, its assertion of the humane, is hard- earned, real and resonant. —Christopher McQuain gay “erotic thriller” directed and co-written by John Huckert, Hard is about a super- butch serial killer (Malcolm Moorman) whose victims are all young male hustlers. There’s also a superbutch cop (Noel Palo- maria) who hides his own queemess from his macho co-workers. He’s assigned to the serial killer case, and events (including inadvertently sleeping with the killer himself) conspire to make him choose between coming out and catching the killer, or keeping his secret and letting the killer run free. Hard is a very poor film, despite perfectly passable camera work and overall technical proficiency. The story, dialogue and editing choices are simply awful. The only scenes that work at all are the horrific rape-torture-murder scenes, which are believable enough to pro voke revulsion. In the context of the rest of the film’s feebleness, however, these scenes seem cheaply manipulative, even insulting. The film’s attempts at showing us the killer’s motivation and giving us a “message”— he’s apparently killing for some ideologically unsound reason, internalized homophobia etc.—are laughable, considering the sensation- alistic, sexualized manner in which the killings are filmed, as well as the killer’s chilling com fort with his sexuality, which clearly includes torture and murder as turn-ons. I won’t even go into the one admirably explicit but inexorably cheesy nonrape sex scene, which for some reason is choreographed ludicrously to a George Michael tune. Perhaps what the filmmakers should’ve done was create something actually porno graphic. In the medium of pom, cheesiness is Continued on Page 47 ’ Mixed flicks A bag of assorted holiday presents for film lovers 0Fire- Grilled Burgers ° Fried Oyster Sandwich ° Wood Oven Fired Pizzas *Figs Marsala * And More! We re a Non-Smoking Establishment °Lunch e? Dinner Seven Days a Week! 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