Paul Thomas Anderson
Magnolia

A day like any other in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, California. Nine stories that touch each other, sometimes merely brushing, other times kissing.

The dance of lives revolves around the figures of two sinful fathers nearing the end, naked before their rotten souls: on one side, Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), a magnate of the entertainment world now bedridden due to cancer, is cared for by the nurse Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whom he asks to find his son Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise) with whom he hasn't had contact for years and who, in the meantime, has become the creator of the program "Seduce and Destroy". Mackey harbors a deep hatred for his father since he abandoned him and his sick mother during his adolescence. Meanwhile, Earl's current wife, Linda (Julianne Moore), realizes the love she feels for her husband and tries to escape the legal bonds that would give her the inheritance of a man she married long ago only for financial gain. On the other side is Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), the TV host of the quiz "What Do Kids Know?" broadcast by Earl Partridge's televisions, and he shares the same fate as Partridge due to the same disease. Gator is the image of honesty and moral integrity but, in reality, he is filthy from a past where he committed atrocities and abuses, even towards his daughter, the cocaine-addicted Claudia (Melora Walters), who now disowns him even when he confesses to her that he has little time left to live; this is shortly before the clumsy police officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly) visits her and falls in love with her. Now Jimmy Gator desperately drags himself to the end, conducting the final episodes of the quiz that features today's child prodigy Stanley (Jeremy Blackman), exploited by a father who doesn't love him in the slightest, while yesterday's child prodigy Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) is now jobless, filled with debts and torn by a homosexual love.

Nine lives that, on any given day, reach the peak of their inner tension, nine lives corroded, regretful, weary, shaken to their cores by a sudden emotional shock that puts them all in front of the mirror; "we can close with the past but the past doesn't close with us" the characters of this tremendous and beautiful dramatic fresco continually repeat, and it is indeed each of their pasts that resurfaces to lead them into a web of coincidences that aren't really coincidences, the past from which every man is unmasked. Paul Thomas Anderson, in his finest film (an "America Today" brimming with tears), finds the root of every evil in the troubled relations between father and son, in a setting where the family, always imposed as an indispensable model of social structure, falls disastrously to the ground, shattering its teeth. And the common thread that binds all these souls ends up being the new deity of recent history: television, the smiling image imposed on you in dinner-time quizzes, the mask par excellence, television that more or less enters into all the narratives until the final moments when it dies by electrocution. The fluidity with which the director manages such an intricate plot is remarkable, the rhythm never fades in this film with a "Gaussian" structure where the pathos reaches its peak in the central moment and the emotions follow the rhythm of the camera alternating rapid shots, frantic editing, with long tracking shots and static close-ups of the actors' faces, all excellent (but a step above others are Julianne Moore's glassy eyes, Jason Robards, for whom death would soon come, and Tom Cruise, proving that when he wants, he can be immense).

The first part of the film offers no respite, feet stomp ever harder, raising a cloud of despair-filled dust that engulfs everything and triggers a heavy, dirty rain on the city of angels, while in the second part, after Cruise's cold, fixed gaze at the petty journalist interviewing him ("I am silently judging you"), everything slows down allowing each character to reach their moment of truth. And in the end, after frogs have rained from the sky, there is room for a smile.