Magnolia is a 1999 American drama film written, directed and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. It stars an ensemble cast, including Jeremy Blackman, Tom Cruise, Melinda Dillon, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ricky Jay, William H. Macy, Alfred Molina, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards (in his final film role), and Melora Walters. The film is an epic mosaic of interrelated characters in search of happiness, forgiveness, and meaning in the San Fernando Valley. The script was inspired by the music of Aimee Mann, who contributed several songs to its soundtrack.
The film had a limited theatrical release by New Line Cinema on December 17, 1999, before expanding wide on January 7, 2000. Magnolia received acclaim from critics. It grossed $48.4 million against a $37 million budget. Among its accolades, the film earned three nominations at the 72nd Academy Awards, where Cruise was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and two at the 57th Golden Globes, where Cruise won Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. It was ranked third in the National Board of Review's top ten films of the year, and won three National Board of Review Awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Hoffman and Best Supporting Actress for Moore, while its soundtrack and score earned a cumulative three nominations at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards.
Plot
Los Angeles police officer Jim Kurring investigates a disturbance at a woman's apartment, finding a body in a closet. Dixon, a neighborhood boy, unsuccessfully tries to tell him who committed the murder. Jim goes to the apartment of Claudia Wilson, whose neighbors called the police after she argued with her estranged father, Jimmy Gator, and blasted music while snorting cocaine. Seemingly oblivious, Jim asks her on a date.
Jimmy hosts a quiz show called What Do Kids Know?, where children and adults compete against each other, and is dying of cancer. The newest child prodigy on the show, Stanley Spector, is hounded by his father Rick for the prize money and demeaned by the adults, who prevent him from using the bathroom during a commercial break. When the show resumes, Stanley wets himself. As the show continues, a drunken Jimmy sickens, ordering the show to go on after he collapses. After Rick berates him, Stanley runs away.
Former What Do Kids Know? champion Donnie Smith, whose parents took all his prize money, has been fired from his job and is in love with a male bartender with braces. Donnie wants to get braces himself, thinking the bartender will love him back. He hatches a plan to steal the money from his former boss for the surgery.
The show's former producer, Earl Partridge, is also dying of cancer, only faster than Jimmy. Earl's trophy wife, Linda, collects his prescriptions while he is cared for by a nurse, Phil Parma. Earl asks Phil to find his estranged son, Frank Mackey, a coarse and blatantly misogynistic but charismatic motivational speaker and pickup artist. Frank is interviewed by a journalist who knows Frank took care of his dying mother after Earl left. Frank storms out of the interview, after which Phil tries to contact him.
Linda goes to see Earl's lawyer, hoping to change his will. She married Earl for his money, but now genuinely loves him and does not want it. The lawyer suggests she renounce the will and decline the money, which would go to Frank. Linda rejects his advice and berates Phil for seeking out Frank, but later apologizes. She drives to a vacant parking lot and attempts suicide by drug overdose. Dixon finds Linda near death in the car, takes the money from her purse, and calls an ambulance.
Jim loses his gun while trying to catch a suspect. When he meets Claudia, they promise to be honest with each other, so he confesses his ineptitude as a cop and admits he has not been on a date since he divorced three years earlier. Claudia says he will hate her because of her problems, but Jim assures her that her past does not matter. They kiss, but she leaves him.
Jimmy goes home to his wife, Rose, and confesses that he cheated on her. She asks why Claudia does not talk to him, and Jimmy admits that Claudia believes he molested her. Rose demands to know if it is true, but Jimmy says he cannot remember. Disgusted, Rose leaves him and he too decides to commit suicide. Elsewhere, Donnie steals the money, but when he decides to return it due to his conscience, he cannot get back inside the office. While Donnie climbs a utility pole to the roof to try to return the money, Jim sees him and feels compelled to investigate.
Suddenly, frogs begin falling from the sky. One of them hits Donnie, he falls from the pole, smashes his teeth and is pulled to safety by Jim. Linda's ambulance crashes near the hospital. As Jimmy is about to shoot himself, frogs fall through his skylight, causing him to shoot the television and cause a house fire. Rose crashes her car near Claudia's apartment but makes it inside and reconciles with her daughter. Earl is awakened and sees Frank beside him before dying.
The next day, Jim's lost gun falls from the sky, after which he helps Donnie return the money. Frank goes to the hospital to be with Linda, who will recover. Stanley tells Rick that he needs to be nicer to him, but Rick just tells him to go to bed. Jim goes to see Claudia, telling her he wants to make things work between them. As Jim is explaining this, Claudia glances into the camera and smiles.
Cast
Also starring are Thomas Jane as the young Jimmy Gator; Cleo King as Marcie; Orlando Jones as Worm; Clark Gregg and Robert Downey Sr. as employees of WDKK; Patton Oswalt as Delmer Darion; Miriam Margolyes as Faye Barringer; and Pat Healy as both Sir Edmund William Godfrey and the young pharmacist. Paul F. Tompkins and Mary Lynn Rajskub provide voice cameos as Chad and Janet, respectively.
Production Development Paul Thomas Anderson started to get ideas for Magnolia during the long editing period of Boogie Nights (1997). As he got closer to finishing the film, he started writing down material for his new project. After the critical and financial success of Boogie Nights, New Line Cinema, who backed that film, told Anderson that he could do whatever he wanted and Anderson realized that, "I was in a position I will never ever be in again." Michael De Luca, then head of production at New Line Cinema, made the deal for Magnolia, granting Anderson final cut without hearing an idea for the film. Originally, Anderson had wanted to make a film that was "intimate and small-scale," something that he could shoot in 30 days. He had the title of "Magnolia" in his head before he wrote the script.
As he started writing, the script "kept blossoming" and he realized that there were many actors he wanted to write for and then decided to put "an epic spin on topics that don't necessarily get the epic treatment". He wanted to "make the epic, the all-time great San Fernando Valley movie". Anderson started with lists of images, words and ideas that "start resolving themselves into sequences and shots and dialogue," actors, and music. The first image he had for the film was the smiling face of actress Melora Walters. The next image that came to him was of Philip Baker Hall as her father. Anderson imagined Hall walking up the steps of Walters' apartment and having an intense confrontation with her. Anderson also did research on the magnolia tree and discovered a concept that eating the tree's bark helped cure cancer.
Before Anderson became a filmmaker, he worked as an assistant for a television game show, Quiz Kid Challenge, an experience he incorporated into the script for Magnolia. He also claimed in interviews that the film is structured somewhat like "A Day in the Life" by The Beatles, and "it kind of builds up, note by note, then drops or recedes, then builds again".
Screenplay By the time he started writing the script, Anderson was listening to the music of his friend Aimee Mann. He used her first two solo albums and demo tracks for her upcoming third album, Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo, as a basis and inspiration; he said he "sat down to write an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs". In particular, Mann's song "Deathly" inspired the character of Claudia. Claudia uses part of the lyric as dialogue in the film ("Now that I've met you / Would you object to / Never seeing each other again"). The film also features a sequence in which the characters sing along to Mann's song "Wise Up".
The character of Jim Kurring originated in 1998, when John C. Reilly grew a moustache out of interest and started putting together an unintelligent cop character. He and Anderson did a few parodies of COPS with Anderson chasing Reilly around the streets with a video camera. Jennifer Jason Leigh made an appearance in one of these videos. Some of Kurring's dialogue came from these sessions. This time around, Reilly wanted to do something different and told Anderson that he was "always cast as these heavies or these semi-retarded child men. Can't you give me something I can relate to, like falling in love with a girl?" Anderson also wanted to make Reilly a romantic lead because it was something different that the actor had not done before.
For Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson wanted him to play a "really simple, uncomplicated, caring character". Hoffman described his character as someone who "really takes pride in the fact that every day he's dealing with life and death circumstances". With Julianne Moore in mind, Anderson wrote a role for her to play a crazed character using many pharmaceuticals. According to Moore, "Linda doesn't know who she is or what she's feeling and can only try to explain it in the most vulgar terms possible". Anderson said that Linda's story was inspired by his own father's wife. For William H. Macy, Anderson felt that Macy was scared of big, emotional parts and wrote "a big tearful, emotional part" for him.
While convincing Philip Baker Hall to do the film by explaining the significance of the rain of frogs, Hall told him a story about when he was in the mountains of Italy and got caught in bad weather—a mix of rain, snow and tiny frogs. Hall had to pull off the road until the storm passed. According to an interview, Hall said that he based the character of Jimmy Gator on real-life television personalities such as Bob Barker and Arthur Godfrey. The rain of frogs was inspired by the works of Charles Fort, and Anderson claims that he was unaware that it was also a reference in The Bible when he first wrote the sequence.Adele Reinhartz, Scripture on the Silver Screen , Westminster John Knox Press, 2003 p25-26 At the time Anderson came across the notion of a rain of frogs, he was "going through a weird, personal time", and he started to understand "why people turn to religion in times of trouble, and maybe my form of finding religion was reading about rains of frogs and realizing that makes sense to me somehow".
Casting