The smiles that light up my world
“Goodbye stranger, it’s been nice. Hope you find your, paradise”
For a Thursday that threatened both sunshine and rain whilst ultimately providing neither, it was another of those strange days to be alive on our prehistoric rock spinning gently through an unquantifiable infinity. Unquantifiable is a weird word when you look at it for perhaps 6 or 7 solid minutes and I don’t particularly suggest you doing so. We could discuss and even gently argue over how many syllables the word has and according to the damned Americanized dictionary here it isn’t even recognised as a word. Which is neither here nor there for this opening lead but I’ve written it now, for good or ill, and whilst I’d spell Americanized with a “s” in place of the “z”, that isn’t particularly relevant either and we’re already veering dangerously into tangents that we have no business with, not today, and not after a Thursday that began and ended with smiles that would light up the darkest of rooms.
After watching my brave baseball boys in Dodger blue defeat those pesky Orioles of Baltimore it was way past 6am local time when I retreated to bed only to awaken way before the shrill of an alarm and the greeting of another day. Less than 3 hours sleep is another of life’s courses I don’t particularly endorse you following. Walls begin to bend. You have a tendency to stare for hours at a time at the moon questioning whether it’s crescent shaped, a full half moon or perhaps that slippery area in between. You end up giving swans human names or singing songs on sunny Monday mornings feeding ducks, oblivious to the world around you. You may also re-read passages of your own writing and see you’ve written “a full half moon” and smile at the quixotic nature and poetry of writing or listen to those damned fools who believe last night’s game, and indeed tonight’s tussle between the same two teams, could be a forerunner for the World Series. Those people clearly haven’t followed the fortunes of the Los Angeles Dodgers in mid to late September. I have. For a quarter of a century. They tend to lose in heart breaking fashion come the play offs. Take it from me. I’ve gone to bed at 6am far too many times across far too many years with the heaviest of sporting hearts.
But not last night and hopefully not later in a future that hasn’t happened yet, but I digress. What this has to do or have any connection with eating bacon and sausage sandwiches on the grass of mother nature and playing and losing at games of cards and the placing of triangle shaped tiles into a correctly numbered format is anyone’s guess at this stage and possibly the most perplexing aspect of this article is the fact I wanted to quickly churn the book ending of a day on planet earth with the most beautiful of smiles and I seem to have veered off into season ending baseball talk, bacon (and sausage) sandwiches and screaming “YAHTZEE!” at the top of my lungs whilst sat beside a flower bed in a busy public park. Naturally this loud exclamation of ecstasy resulted in a thousand yard death stare from my son but he had the last laugh and indeed smile of the day, comprehensively beating me 3 Games to 0 at “Uno” and by 187 points in a game of placing triangles into bridges, bridges into hexagons and generally staring at the board screaming, internally, “I still can’t fucking go”.
He was overjoyed at his victory at “Tri-ominos” and you should have seen the widening of his smile as we tallied the final scores! But oh for my son’s smile before victory in a hand of Uno. The lad has no poker face to speak of, more a sunshine smile on the cusp of a giggle, and you know as well as he does that he’s about to win yet another hand, tally up yet more points and proclaim yet more Game victories to have been won. That’s when the real smile arrives, the greatest smile in the world.
We listened to Bruce Springsteen on the drive back. Largely in a comfortable silence I thought of the sunshine smile beside me during “Badlands”, my dear old Mum during “Thunder Road” and I just about kept it together as we listened to “Racing in the Street”. Why is a confession for another time. Settling back into the rhythm of our days together the lad decided, totally unbidden by me, at least not today, that today was indeed the day he wanted to watch “Magnolia” for the first time. This was it I thought, that rite of passage moment of finally watching this soul destroying masterpiece with my son. Keep it together Stephen I may or may not have said to myself in the garden ahead of “curtain up”. Don’t go talking all over the film either someone else chimed in, another voice in a head overflowing with them. “Don’t mention the frogs!” screamed another, whilst another voice reminded me not to recite all of Tom Cruise’s lines and don’t, whatever you do, go on and on about how the director has moved an entire 90 second scene in one flowing movement without any cuts or edits and a young boy’s life is about to change and flower and take on a determined life of its own in the worst of circumstances and on a fictional TV game show the director guides us to via the pouring rain of outside through a maze of tunnels and corridors in the bowels of a tall building they will scale in one fluid motion before passing through more corridors and dressing rooms before arriving at the floor of a popular TV show thrown into the chaos of the impending death of their host. Who needs that? And don’t start crying when Aimee Mann starts singing “Wise Up” for crying out loud!
All these voices and more were screaming for my attention as I settled down to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece for the first time with my son, and I largely ignored all of them. Conservatively, I’ve watched this film 20 times, which equates to 2 and a half days and nights of my life. Mainly nights, often alone or when scaring any potential love interests running for the hills when I disintegrate into pieces when Aimee Mann (and indeed the entire cast) sing, or when the director cleverly and slowly backs his camera away from a boy with a broken heart or the teenager in a man’s body sobbing he has “lots of love to give”. The lad smiled as I rambled through my scatter-gun dissection of the film: luck, chance, destiny, solitude in a small world, a highly probable case of incest, an even higher probability of two characters dying, duplicity, bullying, depression, anxiety, feelings of worthlessness, self destruction, two characters only wanting the very best for others around them…oh, and frogs raining from the sky before love, compassion, concern for others, reunification, re-birth, re-awakenings and then, when all has been lost and much more has been found, Claudia looks directly into the camera and smiles.
I usually dissolve into a sobbing mess at this point, but not today.
Today I smiled, and that made three of us.
Goodbye stranger.
It’s been nice.
I hope you’ve found your personal paradise.
“Magnolia” (1999)
“I don’t know where to put things, you know? I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it”
Seen on far too many occasions for me to admit. OK, the old joke is I watch this once a month just to keep my hand in, and there’s a little truth to the joke. But where to start with this modern classic? Vague and bizarre weather reports? CHECK. Raining frogs? CHECK. Bizarre, interwoven but seemingly unconnected historical events? CHECK. Tom Cruise acting his arse off? CHECK. Melora Walters providing an acting master class of immense proportions? CHECK. A beautiful yet haunting musical score from Jon Brion? CHECK. I could go on (Philip Seymour Hoffman is incredible) but I am exceedingly biased and simply blown away every time I watch this. However, in the fairness of balance(?) some have criticised this as way too melancholic, confusing, upsetting and a plodding over long drama. To those I retort it is uplifting beyond measure and with a screenplay from director Anderson that resonates through every character and central performances that astound me every time.
This is but the tip of a very deep iceberg, again covering relationships, human frailty, desperation, loneliness, despair but intermingled with joy, redemption, recovery and the triumph of the human spirit. Whenever you’re settled into the film, a seemingly unconnected “event” is interwoven into the narrative to make you question the event and its relevance. Oh, and there’s 7/8 interweaving stories from rich, seemingly unconnected characters all taking place at the same time, in the same city, which slowly and deliberately come together to produce a sublime piece of cinema. The DVD “extras” has a feature length documentary on the making of this masterpiece which is as essential a watch as the film itself. I can’t possibly do this film justice, it truly is a masterpiece, and the starting point for my cinematic love for Paul Thomas Anderson.
Back to the film itself: You have Tom Cruise as never seen before and never better as Men’s Sexual Counsellor “Frank TJ Mackey”, Julianne Moore as guilt ridden, drug taking, cheating wife “Linda Partridge” to Jason Robards “Earl Partridge” (stand out performance), John C Reilly’s error prone but good hearted policeman “Jim Kurring”, Philip Baker Hall dominates the screen in every scene as “Jimmy Gator” and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heart-breaking performance as male nurse “Phil Parma”. This truly is a stellar cast and a stellar film, with numerous more cameo performances from Luis Guzman, Alfred Molina, Michael Bowen and Melinda Dillon to name but a few.
Yet to be mentioned are “Quiz Kid Donnie Smith” (brilliantly portrayed by William H Macy), Melora Walters will break your heart as “Claudia” and Jeremy Blackman similarly as the precocious quiz kid, “Stanley Spector”.
The following short scene gets me every time, is the most bizarre and surreal in a very high calibre list of bizarre and surreal moments and is roughly 4 minutes of screen time from this 188 minute master class. It occurs towards the end of Act Two and it tells you everything and nothing and leads us onto the fantastic soundtrack accompanying this film:
As the strains of Aimee Mann’s brilliant “Wise Up” begins so do every main character in the film, singing along in separate edited segments to the entirety of the song. Beginning with Claudia as first she announces “You’re so stupid” before snorting two lines of cocaine and singing along, the camera slowly panning in to a close up of her before slowly cutting to Jim, now also singing along, revealed by a slow pan around a bedroom door to reveal him sitting on the edge of his bed, the cross clearly illuminated on the wall behind him. Next is Jimmy Gator, sitting at home singing along as another slow pan closes in on him, followed by Donnie Smith, similar panning shot as before, this time, his large winner’s cheque clearly illuminated behind him as he sings along. Next is the stricken Earl Partridge and his nurse Phil Parma but here they are both singing along as the camera slowly pans past Phil and into a close up of Earl. Now moving outside for the first time and two similar shots of separate cars drenched in the pouring rain, and of firstly Linda Partridge singing along before a slow reveal shows Frank TJ Mackey doing likewise before a final shot of Stanley Spector brings both the song and this bizarre scene to a close.
Two interesting issues to note before we close: firstly Stanley’s panning shot is the first to move away from a character as all of the others have been zoom/pans into a character and secondly as the song ends as does the pouring rain, very abruptly to be replaced with yet another bizarre weather forecast “Rain Clearing, Breezy Overnight”.
Leaving aside spoilers and major plot points, this film is as near as cinematic perfection as you can get. The overall soundtrack itself to the film is minimal, but is saved, quite literally, by Aimee Mann’s haunting and beautiful “Save Me” over the closing credits and “Wise Up” as briefly described above. However, with various tracks interspersed within the film, the stand alone soundtrack to the film is highly recommended. Dominated by Aimee Mann with further tracks “One”, “Build that Wall”, “You Do” and “Nothing is Good Enough”, there are also gems from Supertramp “The Logical Song”, Gabrielle’s “Dreams” (hilariously used in the film) and some joyous operatic pieces such as “Habanera from Carmen” by Georges Bizet and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss.
Brilliant and darkly funny, heart breaking, thought provoking or melancholic and dreary drama. Your take your chance, your choose your poison. Just watch out for the frogman in the tree, the guy on the roof and those pesky raining frogs! It really happened you know! If you haven’t seen this film and are reading the characters as sex counsellor, male nurse, policeman and quiz kid’s and wondering what the hell is going on, well welcome to the club! And the good news is, it works. Perfectly. All of the disparate stories, events, cut-scenes and even the raining frogs, it’s a complete triumph of the will film.
Thanks for reading. Whilst you’re here, can I show you a delightful book I self-published in March of this year?
"Tales I Tell Myself" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.