Blossoming Brilliance
P.T. Anderson is an auteur for a new century with echoes of the old.

MAGNOLIA
With Tom Cruise, William H. Macy, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

HOW CAN YOU ACCOUNT for an audacious movie like Magnolia? And how do you explain Paul Thomas Anderson, the writer/director of Magnolia and Boogie Nights who just turned 30 years old a few days ago?

You can certainly draw lines if you like from Magnolia to other '90s movies about our disconsolate modern world, or to the canon of Robert Altman, the iconic director of Nashville and M*A*S*H who revolutionized the way we see and hear American movies. But Anderson is so inspiring in his own right you almost don't want to compare him to anyone.

For most of Magnolia you'll wonder where Anderson is taking you, so you might as well just relax and enjoy it. His talent for surprise is dauntless, and he seems to understand the affliction of despair we've brought upon ourselves in a modern age of pop-cult pseudo-self-actualization.

Like Altman's Short Cuts, Magnolia takes place in Los Angeles and follows about a dozen characters whose lives finally come together through an act of God. Altman's unifying event was a modest earthquake; Anderson's is something much more fantastic and profound -- an occurrence of Biblical proportions, and so utterly bizarre you won't believe anyone could dream it up.

But Anderson tells us we should: His movie opens with a prologue about a stranger-than-fiction murder/suicide, which we see from myriad angles and points of view as a narrator assures us that inconceivable things like this happen all the time. If you like, you can believe this narrator is only referring to those moments in Magnolia that defy rational explanation. But Anderson really wants to draw our attention to the dramatic day-to-day things that happen to his characters on this particular day, which has come to cause them more torment than some of them think they can possibly continue to bear.

The wealthy Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), once a famous TV producer, is now a decrepit old man married to a young gold-digger (Julianne Moore) and dying of cancer in his spacious home. So his simpering nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) sets out to contact his estranged son, Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), a pumped-up Iron John mutant who conducts retreats where he teaches men how to get in touch with their inner misogynist.

Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) -- America's most cherished TV host, husband of Rose Gator (Melinda Dillon), father of Claudia Gator (Melora Walters) and a paragon of family values -- will shag anything in a skirt. He aches to reunite with his estranged daughter, a cocaine addict who's just met Officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), a desperately lonely, relentlessly dedicated, pathetically aphoristic L.A. beat cop.

Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) is a child, but he can recite lines from Carmen in French by hearing the English translation. So with a self-serving push from his ambitious stage father, he's burning up the set on What Do Kids Know, Jimmy Gator's popular quiz show between three egghead kids and three cutthroat adults. Stanley has become like famous former quiz kid Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), a sad sack near his flashpoint who's just lost his job -- which he only got because of nostalgia for his childhood TV fame.

For all of Anderson's elegiac touches in Magnolia -- the music that stalks the characters like a phantom, turning their lives into opera, or the narrative tricks that unite them when they're physically apart -- all he finally wants to show is how alienated we've become from each other and ourselves. In that sense, he recalls the passion of Ingmar Bergman, but filtered through the lens of the "cinema of loneliness," a term coined by Robert Phillip Kolker in 1980 for his invaluable book that chronicles American cinema of the '60s and '70s, the last distinguished era of American film.

First in Boogie Nights and now again in Magnolia, Anderson explores the idea of families falling apart and coming together. That's a theme right out of Altman, so it's apropos that Magnolia features cameos by a few actors -- Henry Gibson as a fey bar patron, Michael Murphy as a pragmatic lawyer -- who worked with Altman so memorably.

A lot of people hailed Quentin Tarantino in 1994 when he made Pulp Fiction and spawned a short-lived generation of irrelevant imitators. You don't see such clamor surrounding Anderson because he's far more dense and serious, and because he bases his work on human experience rather than on his experiences watching other movies. His actors in Magnolia are impeccable, from the lachrymose Moore and the wickedly flamboyant Cruise, to the dispirited Macy and Reilly -- both Anderson troubadours from Boogie Nights -- as two of the loneliest men on earth. It's an ensemble worthy of great cinema in a film with no equal, and it come at a time when audacity in the American cinema means killing people good or blowing things up bigger and better than the last guy.