Magnolia

In the 70s and early 80s I enjoyed going to the cinema to watch films on my own. The quieter the cinema, the better. I enjoyed buying a piece (maybe two) of cold pizza with a black olive and salty anchovies on it, in greaseproof paper, from the Topping Street delicatessen, when Blackpool was a place that might have a delicatessen, and taking it to enjoy in the dark womb of the Odeon. I don’t know if I had the artifice to hide it while going into the cinema, or whether the cashier really didn’t care.  

I rarely went with anyone else, I was a loner and still am happy in my own company. If you’re on your own there’s nothing to live up to, no need to mesh your plans with anyone else’s, and definitely no need to share your pizza. The world is your lobster, as Arthur Daley would have it.

Films I’ve regarded as ‘favourite films’ over time, include Annie Hall and Manhattan by Woody Allen, Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg and the doyen of my golden mid-70s period, The Great Gatsby… the 1974 version starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford. So much melancholy, it was glorious., melancholy being one of my favourite emotions. Oh the sadness ,and all that useless glory. Thank you… Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

In 2000 I went to the new Odeon, a travesty of its splendid forbear, to see my most favourite film, probably because it was my last favourite. It’s Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson (this is NOT Steel Magnolias which for some people is what the title auto-corrects to in their brain).

I’d probably read a review of the film in The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw or the Chicago Sun Times’ Roger Ebert (my go-to critics, especially when Roger was alive) before choosing to go. I still have the ticket for Magnolia, when a cinema was a place you might need a ticket to go into. I wouldn’t be surprised to find you just need a phone to go in now.

Magnolia is what’s called a portmanteau film. If you haven’t come across the term before with regard to filmography, it’s a composition of several interlocking stories all of which find their denouement.

The start of the film has a series of events that all revolve around coincidence which ends with the start of the soundtrack, One by Aimee Mann, an American singer. Yes I still have the excellent soundtrack album, but I have to Manhattan too.

It’s a hard watch. Tom Cruise is a foul-mouthed TV evangelical misogynist, the phone number to join his raw Seduce and Destroy class is 01-877-TAME-HER. Tom is estranged from his father, Jason Robards. Philip Baker Hall a TV quiz host, is the estranged father of drug addict Melinda Dillon, William H Macy is a child quiz star, now fully grown, (known ever after as Quiz Kid Donnie Smith) who hated being a child star but was subject to his overbearing father. Julianne Moore is falling apart while her father, Jason Robards, is dying of cancer. So far, so bad. 

John C Reilly a cop looking for real love and Philip Seymour Hoffman is a carer invited to stay in Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) house by Julianne Moore so he can look after her husband in his last few days because she can’t do it emotionally. She hasn’t been the wife she should have been.

The cop, the quiz host’s wife and daughter and the carer are the only characters who seem to have a shred of decency about them and no hangups from the past, mind you Phil could do with a girlfriend. 

And let’s not forget the (biblical) plague of frogs that rains down on the night Julianne Moore is returning to Jason without the drugs she wanted from the pharmacy for the husband she’d finally fallen in love with, now he was dying. Philip Seymour Hoffman eventually persuades Frank TJ Mackey (Cruise) to come “home”, to make it up with Dad, in his dying moments.

There are a lot of interconnecting threads in this 3 hour plus epic, and the whole thing moves along at a pace that kept me entranced. And there’s light at the end of the tunnel for nearly everyone. It’s a fantastic film, but good things don’t always come easy.

I took a girlfriend along to see Magnolia on a first date watching it a second time in its first week of release. I hadn’t really noticed when I was on my own but when she was there I was embarrassed about some of the subject matter and liberal use of profanity, apologising and hoping she didn’t think the worse of me.

Well, she said she enjoyed it, and who knows? You might too.