Today is my birthday! Well, not exactly, my birthday is February 29th and it doesn’t come around this year. So, in honor of my fake birthday I watched one of my top two favorite movies of all time. My all time favorite movie that I am not posting about is La mala educación/Bad Education by Pedro Almodóvar. I can’t post about that because I’m still having post-traumatic stress from writing a 45 page thesis on it last year. Anyway, this movie:
Magnolia (1999, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson) is a perfect movie. I know I just threw that word around in my other posts about Biutiful and The Social Network but sometimes movies are really perfect, to me. I saw it for the first time in a high school creative writing class when we were writing screenplays. My (favorite) teacher showed us this film as an example of a really good screenplay. Then I rented it, watched it again, then I bought it, and watched it a few more times but I hadn’t seen it in years until last night. And let me tell you, it is still perfect.
ALL of the characters, and there are a LOT of them, are three dimensional and miserable and wonderful and they all either change or don’t change but at the very least they grow in some way. Nearly every line of dialog is poignant, sad, and powerful. The story itself may appear to fall into one of those movies about a bunch of different people who magically all have something to do with each other at the end. But Magnolia does not fall into that trap, by inserting a voiceover narration at the most unexpected moments, giving a meta-commentary on the idea of coincidence, and just being perfect. Each situation is as heartbreaking as the next, and each character just has so much depth, something you don’t see in a lot of films. If you are a sad person or even just a thoughtful person, you will probably relate to each struggle in some way.
I’m going to list a few of my favorite quotes from the film:
Quiz Kid Donnie Smith (played by William H. Macy):
“I really do have love to give; I just don’t know where to put it.”
“And the book says, ‘We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.'”
“No it is not dangerous to confuse children with angels.”
Earl Partridge (played by Jason Robards, pictured with wife Linda, played by Julianne Moore):
“Don’t ever let anyone say to you ‘You shouldn’t regret anything.’ Don’t do that, don’t! You regret what you fucking want! And use that, use that, use that regret for anything, any way you want. You can use it, okay? This fucking life…it’s so fucking hard, so long! Life ain’t short, it’s long, it’s long, God damnit.”
And finally, from the narrator:
And there is the account of the hanging of three men, and a scuba diver, and a suicide. There are stories of coincidence and chance, of intersections and strange things told, and which is which and who only knows? And we generally say, “Well, if that was in a movie, I wouldn’t believe it.” Someone’s so-and-so met someone else’s so-and-so and so on. And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time. And so it goes, and so it goes. And the book says, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.”
And those are just some of the reasons why Magnolia is perfect and my favorite and the movie that made me truly realize that film can be art.
The Canted Angle 