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Old 04-12-2018, 12:29 AM   #9531
Seanny One Ball
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Magnolia - 3/4

What happens when a writer gets too bogged down in clever connections, individually brilliant pieces of dialogue and a plot that needs to be threaded tighter than an Egyptian's bedspread? You get a handful of joy bred from the train of thought that the story takes you down but not much more. Somehow all of the positives cluster up in odd frequencies and leave long patches of inert, expectation-filled fidget space.
Simply put this film could be taglined "Magnolia - Laid On A Bit Thick" or "Other People's Problems".
A lot of it seems brilliant but comes off as hugely pretentious and in all honesty it feels more like a film by the maker of Phantom Thread, The Master and Inherent Vice than a film by the maker of Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. I prefer his earlier work but Magnolia has an epic performance each by Julianne Moore and Philip Baker Hall and a lot of wonderful ideas that are supposed to pull together and form a far better shape than we end up with. I think it would have benefited from the removal of the William H Macy storyline and the entire Melora Walters character. You get a streamlined version of the same film that way and all you lose is padding and a thoroughly poor performance from Walters which drags John C Reilly down with it which is a shame because he's excellent.
Tom Cruise was really quite spectacular in his part for what that's worth. I think I'd have made the film mostly about him and Julianne Moore's story, they had a particularly strong background in the film and the way they played their roles was surprisingly vicious. I loved their vitriol.
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