January 7, 2000 | You barely have a chance to get comfortable in your seat before the wild ride begins in Magnolia. With equal measures of deadpan cool and breathless impatience, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights) zips through three unconnected and vaguely unsettling tales of chance. There are no happy endings, no inspiring morals. Instead, the vignettes percolate with unforgiving ironies and darkly comical coincidences, all the better to underscore what quickly emerges as the movie’s underlying theme: The things of life are furiously random and capricious, and yet – sometimes tragically, sometimes wondrously -- patterns appear, if only by accident. Ultimately, everything is inevitable only because it goes to the trouble of happening.

Which, of course, is just another way of saying that, if you look at things from the right angle, life can seem more shamelessly contrived and clichéd than anything a storyteller might dare to invent. Anderson slyly plays that premise as his trump card in Magnolia, to justify the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate individuals -- and, occasionally, to ignite a few amusing epiphanies of self-awareness – in LA’s San Fernando Valley.

At one point, a sad-eyed nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who’s tending to a dying TV mogul (Jason Robards) tries to find the old man’s long-lost son, a bombastically macho sex-advice guru (played with fearless exuberance by Tom Cruise). The nurse calls some minor functionary in the son’s business empire, and desperately pleads for access to the guy at the top. Yes, the nurse admits, this is just like some scene in a movie, the part where the prodigal son has a deathbed reunion with his dad. “But I think they have those scenes in movies because they’re true,” the nurse insists. “Because they really happen.”

According to Magnolia, it is equally true that – once again, if you look from the right angle – you can see all manner of mirror images and fortuitous linkages among any sizable cross-section of people. While Earl Partridge, the TV mogul, slowly succumbs to cancer, another dying father, veteran quiz-show host Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) seeks reconciliation with his own estranged adult child (a skittish, self-loathing cokehead played by Melora Walters). Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), a child genius who’s smart enough to realize how his father is exploiting him, achieves a dubious superstardom on Jimmy’s television show. This doesn’t go unnoticed by a former quiz show whiz kid, Donny Smith (William H. Macy), a self-pitying burnout who can’t -- or won’t -- forget how his parents cheated him of his cash prizes.

As the TV mogul’s nurse selflessly strives to do the right thing, another good-hearted, well-meaning fellow does his bit to make the world a better place. Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), a lonely guy who probably shouldn’t talk to himself so much, isn’t terribly good at his job as an LAPD cop. But he’s a deeply compassionate type, and he instinctively gravitates toward Claudia Gator, the quiz show host’s drug-addled daughter. Jim is smitten, naturally, but that’s not the whole story: He sincerely wants to save Claudia, and himself. Trouble is, Claudia is too far gone to easily believe she’s capable of being saved. In this, she is a counterpoint to Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore), Earl’s beautiful but increasingly haggard trophy wife. Linda married Earl for his money, and didn’t worry much about remaining faithful during most of their marriage. Now that he’s near death, however, she’s frantic with guilt and remorse, and barely able to contain herself, even with massive doses of medication. Her frequent and fiery arias of rage are truly scary spectacles. But, then again, her emotional extremes are scarcely more excessive than anything else in this full-tilt, go-for-broke movie.

You really need at least two viewings, and maybe more, to fully appreciate Anderson’s bold and brilliant mosaic of lost souls, long goodbyes and desperate longings. During the fastest three hours you will ever spend inside a movie theater, emotional fireworks blaze across the screen, imperfect strangers fatefully intersect, wounded children are haunted by the sins of their dying parents – and twists of fate are fueled by a miracle of Biblical proportions. And while Cruise, Reilly and Moore are undeniably superb, they are merely first, second and third among equals in an astonishing ensemble cast.
 
In terms of style, structure and overlapping storylines, Magnolia owes a lot to Robert Altman’s Nashville. (Anderson frankly acknowledges the debt by casting Henry Gibson, a key player in Altman’s masterwork, as an effete barfly.) But Magnolia is too original, too unique, to be diminished by comparisons, flattering or otherwise. Don’t take my word for it: Go see it for yourself. And don’t be surprised if you want to see it again and again.