I Like to Watch | Magnolia (1999)
I love Tom Cruise.
I've been a fan of his work since Risky Business. There are two kinds of Hollywood actors: the movie stars and the actors. The movie stars include performers like George Clooney, Sondra Bullock, Kevin Costner, Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Reynolds—these folks are always just exaggerated versions of themselves. No transformation into another person but so compelling as themselves that all you need to do is put them in a situation onscreen and they're imminently watchable. Then there are the actors—Daniel Day-Lewis, Meryl Streep, Anthony Hopkins, Tilda Swinton, Forrest Whitaker who are a completely different person in every film.
Cruise is both a movie star and an actor. He can be the embodiment of himself in movies like Rain Man, The Color of Money, Lions for Lambs, and Jerry Maguire. He can also modify himself in characters who resemble him in very few ways in films like Born on the Fourth of July, Interview with a Vampire, Collateral,and Tropic Thunder.
Sure, he's kind of nuts and involved at the highest level with one of the most pervasive and successful cults in modern history but I'm not having lunch with the guy so I can separate him from his art pretty easily.
One of his signature roles is that of Ethan Hunt in the huge Mission Impossible franchise. Mostly an extension of himself, Hunt is definitely Cruise at his movie star best. He does get to have some incredibly juicy scenes in these films with serious heavy hitters. In that franchise, he's worked with mega-talents like Anthony Hopkins, Thandiwe Newton, Sean Harris, Jean Reno, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Oh, man. I love Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Hoffman is an actor. From Punch Drunk Love and Almost Famous to Synecdoche, New York and Capote,the man was prolific in a very specific actorly manner. He could completely disappear into a character so thoroughly that it makes me wonder what the guy was like off screen and I can never know if he was more like Reverend Veasey in Cold Mountain or Lancaster Dodd in The Master.
One of the most ridiculously amazing moments of his is in Boogie Nights when he tries to kiss Mark Wahlberg only to realize his mistake as Wahlberg goes back to his porn mom played by Julianne Moore.
Now, Julianne Moore? I love Julianne Moore.
She's the kind of actor that swings for the home run with every single breath. Maude Lebowski? Christ, that's a performance that is so iconic in an already iconic film that you can't imagine anyone saying "He's a good man...and thorough" without hearing her voice. Julian in Children of Men, Evelyn Ryan in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, and Laura Brown from The Hours all demonstrate her unparalleled ability to carve out a truly unique performance in any setting.
Speaking of Boogie Nights, Moore worked with such extraordinarily talented actors like Willam H. Macy, John C. Reilly, Melora Walters, Philip Baker Hall, and one of my favorite figures in film, the incomparable Ricky Jay.
I fucking love Ricky Jay.
Some movie stars. Some actors. Some a bit of both.
All of them, from all walks of Hollywood life and with resumes as long as an arm, converge in one of my favorite movies of all time, the 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson opus of random connections, improbable coincidences, and horribly broken people converging into one day in Los Angeles, Magnolia.
Magnolia is a story of sadness and loss, of lives lived in bitterness, of children abused and adults unable to do anything but destroy themselves. As the narrator tells us near the end, "We may be through with the past, but the past is never through with us."
After the financial and critical success of Boogie Nights, New Line Cinema told Paul Thomas Anderson that they would bankroll whatever he fancied making afterwards. Anderson readily agreed to this as he figured that it was very unlikely that he would ever be in that position again. It shows because this is a film written by someone with no intentions of editing a word or phrase. This film is an all-you-can-eat buffet of language and moments and sadness that, while is quite long, never stops moving for a second.
Back in the 90's, I wrote, produced, and directed a lot of theater. I had founded with friends an Off Loop Chicago theater company devoted to original, improvisationally-inspired plays and performance art. One of my obsessions was with an image.
I don't where or when I heard of this image but it stuck with me for a solid decade. The image is of an apartment building, some six or seven floors up, with the front facade magically sliced off to reveal the people in each apartment. In one we might see a baby being born, in another an old man dying at the same time. Someone falling in love in one room, a couple in the throes of dissolution in another. A woman filled with joy right next to a man contemplating suicide.
I discovered the concept of Sonder around the same time and the definition from the The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is:
sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
This idea was likewise supported by perhaps my favorite essayist, David Foster Wallace, in his speech This is Water.
I was fascinated by this and, in pursuit of finding it in a piece of theater, I created shows like Postmortem, an improvised play following the life and death of someone pulled directly from the obituaries in the Chicago Tribune, CrossCurrents, a silent l'ronde set to original music detailing the missed and found connections between nine characters, and The Stink of Destiny, another silent piece set to pre-existing music to demonstrate the ongoing relationships and loss of one woman through three periods in her life.
When I went to see Magnolia I discovered a film that captured this concept more clearly, more beautifully, than I could have ever conceived of myself. I was transcendent.
From the opening narration (by the remarkable Ricky Jay) detailing the improbability of coincidences to the various apartment cutouts—Jimmy Gator hosting his quiz show for the last time as he confronts cancer, Earl Partridge dying and his younger wife lamenting her role in his life, the police officer who follows a call to investigate loud music instantly falling for Claudia, the coked up daughter of Gator suffering from the trauma of his earlier abuse, Donny "The Quiz Kid" Smith longing for the love of a bartender and in pursuit of unnecessary braces to impress him, the hospice nurse of Partridge seeking out Earl's estranged son, and that son in the form of Frank "TJ" Mackey, a self help guru with a mantra to "Respect the Cock and Tame the Cunt" in his Seek and Destroy system weave around together, jumping from place to place, moment to moment, all colliding with the Biblical rain of frogs that concludes the thing.
As Mackey, Tom Cruise is in full actor mode and is as charismatic and broken as the character. He is simply mesmerizing in a film with so many incredible performances from start to finish. Apparently, Cruise loved Boogie Nights so much, he asked Anderson to consider him for a part in his next film. Cruise, while initially rather terrified at playing such a change in pace, relished the role as it was so completely different from the repressed character he played in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
"The truth of the matter is when I sat down to write Magnolia, I truly sat down to write something very small, very quick, very intimate, and something I could make very cheaply," Anderson recalled of his initial intention. "Boogie Nights was this massive, two-and-a-half-hour epic. And I thought, 'You know what? I wanna bury my head in the sand and just make a little small movie.'"
But of course, that wasn't the final result. "I started to write and well, it kept blossoming. And I got to the point where still it's a very intimate movie, but I realized I had so many actors I wanted to write for that the form started to come more from them. Then I thought it would be really interesting to put this epic spin on topics that don't necessarily get the epic treatment, which is usually reserved for war movies or political topics. But the things that I know as big and emotional are these real intimate everyday moments, like losing your car keys, for example. You could start with something like that and go anywhere."
Anderson had written Mackey in golf pants and polo shirts but Cruise convinced his director he would wear an armband, “those leather-wrist, masculine hero kind of things," and the whole wardrobe changed.
The closest thing I can say I ever directed that felt as epic and intimate as Magnolia was a few years later with The Edward Hopper Project. The improbable coincidence was that when my wife and I started dating, she came to my apartment and saw a photo taken from that show. "Oh my god, did you see that show? It was incredible!"
"I directed that show."
We were engaged on our third date.
