Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson I'm not sure if this entire film was built around Aimee Mann's "Wise Up," or if Magnolia is really a love letter to Aimee Mann herself. What's clear is that Paul Thomas Anderson wrote his sprawling, three-hour epic with her music as the foundation. Nine original songs from Mann comprise the soundtrack, her dark, sardonic style meshing perfectly with Anderson's vision of damaged people struggling through one terrible day in the San Fernando Valley. In the soundtrack liner notes, Anderson writes that all the stories branched off from one character inspired by Mann's music, adding, "You can look at the movie as the perfect memento to remember the songs that Aimee has made" (Tastemakers Music Magazine). Either way, the soundtrack is beautiful, essential, inseparable from what makes the film work. Watching all these characters descend into their own private hell for the first two acts is amazing. This is PTA's master class in casting. Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards, William H. Macy, Melora Walters — every one of them was cast perfectly. Moore's breakdown is magnetic, like watching a train wreck in slow motion; you can't look away even as you know it's going to end badly. Hoffman brought tears to my eyes with his tender performance as a nurse caring for a dying man, finding grace in the most ungraceful circumstances. Robards delivers a master class in not giving away the script until it says to do that, holding back emotion until the dam breaks. And then there's Tom Cruise, so perfect in his role as a toxic masculinity guru that it even makes him look like he can act. That alone should tell you how good Anderson is. "Wise Up" functions as the transition to the denouement, and it's brilliant, integral to the story. The film stops, or rather shifts gears entirely, as one by one each character begins singing along to Mann's song. It's structurally audacious, emotionally devastating, and it shouldn't work but absolutely does. That moment transforms Magnolia from a collection of intersecting stories into something unified, a recognition that all these broken people share the same fundamental truth: it's not going to stop until you wise up. This is Anderson at his most ambitious, most vulnerable, most willing to take enormous risks. Magnolia is messy, sprawling, occasionally excessive, but it earns every minute of its runtime through sheer emotional honesty and technical mastery. It's a film about forgiveness, regret, connection, and the possibility of grace in a graceless world, all underscored by Mann's songs that make the unspoken spoken, the unbearable bearable. This audio-visual art is a masterpiece.

This isn't so much a piece of cinema as a cinematographic exercise is crochet-work! There are nine folks central to it's plots - for there are at least three - yet as we progress we realise that there is a degree of integration between the characters that becomes less tangential as the stories unravel. "Jimmy" (Philip Baker Hall) has hosted a quiz series for thirty-odd years that showcases the precocious wisdom of the children of America. It's current champion is the astonishingly bright "Stanley" (Jeremy Blackman) but as their team achievements edge ever close to record-breaking territory, he becomes uncharacteristically nervous! Meantime, grown-up daughter "Claudia" (Melora Walters) has a penchant for the white powder and lives in a grubby apartment living a life that is only going to lead her in one direction. The there's "Frank" (Tom Cruise) who is the epitome of evangelising motivational speakers determined to make a decent living empowerng the male sex to take back control of their own sexual identity. He, of course, offers us an abject lesson in doing as I say not as I do. Another alumni of the quiz is "Donnie" (William H. Macy) whose own life wasn't exactly helped by being struck by lightning and so he is now largely only focused on getting some braces for his teeth and then, finally, there is the attentive police officer "Kurring" (John C. Reilly) who is struggling to deal with an unexpectedly quiet occupant of a woman's closet! Is "Jimmy" the only conduit for these interwoven characters here, or might the cancer suffering and bedridden "Partridge" (Jason Robards) have a part to play? Even as he lies on death's door consuming his oxygen from a cylinder contemplating his own life, not least his unfulfilled marriage to the gold-digging "Linda" (Julianne Moore). If that doesn't give you a clue as to the initial messiness of this, and as to why it needs to be just over the three hours long, then I don't know what will - but once we have established the premiss of interconnectivies of these folks, this is a surprisingly easy film to follow that is loaded with characterful performances and quirkiness as it makes evaluations of family, fame and loneliness. What is real? Who is real? Indeed, when might even be real? The timelines are often darting about from the youth of some to the old age of others then back again in fashion that can seem haphazard but that does actually knit together, after a fashion, as we end what could be the whole film or really just a few of it's constituent chapters. Now there is a great deal of padding here, and you have to be prepared for periods of time where the story inches at barely a glacial pace in whatever direction the auteur has selected for this phase of this drama, but with strong efforts from Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman (the nurse), the understated Macy and from an out of his comfort zone Cruise, this is a film that benefits from a few viewings to appreciate it's nuanced and darkly comedic elements as well as it's more physocologically complex ones.