Two sprawling dramas find themselves on DVD this month, one of which references the other and hopes, maybe, to beat it at its own game. With so many films these days unduly stamped "Altmanesque," the home video restoration of the eponymous director's seminal 1975 work Nashville offers us a chance to define the term and in the face of the latest movie to have the ascription tattooed on its forehead, Paul Thomas Anderson's somewhat-endearingly pretentious ('It's Exodus 8:2! Get it?') Magnolia. Tonally, they couldn't be further removed from one another.

Hitchcock has been invoked among the print-ad pull-quotes for nearly every thriller of the past two decades, which points up a proliferation of lazy and/or limited reviewers; saying "Hitchcockian" is more or less the equivalent of saying "tastes like chicken." It's a critic's crutch that ignores technique, themes, impulses--Hitchcock is summarily reduced to a very good genre filmmaker. Likewise, people write "Altmanesque" when "soap operatic" would probably serve them better, pejorative connotations be damned.

We need to get away from thinking of Robert Altman as a maker of ensemble pieces: it's a format he hasn't returned to as often as some may think. (Four times thus far by this writer's estimation: A Wedding, Nashville, Short Cuts, and Ready to Wear. One could also mount a case for MASH.) What links Altman's motion pictures, even defines his style, is an unparalleled verisimilitude, an understanding of as well as a unique ability to harness the nuances of social interaction. His static or subtly zooming frame and nine-track tape recorder are so unflinching in this regard that certain scenes become a voyeur's nightmare; Altman doesn't shy away from conversations that have become embarrassing or lost their purpose (which happens often due to the improvisation Altman encourages of his actors), leading those who laugh uncomfortably at the people onscreen to speculate satirical intentions.

Take the moment in Nashville when Ronee Blakely, as a country starlet recuperating from exhaustion, has a breakdown on stage, babbling incoherent childhood reminiscences to a completely disengaged audience. According to a friend who attended a recent rep-house screening of the 160-minute opus, his fellow moviegoers mocked her, perhaps thinking Altman was cuing them to do so. And maybe he was, but I also know the modern revival crowd quite well, and they tend to swathe their unease in derisive giggles, as my "American Cinema" classmates did when Al Pacino discovered his wife had had an abortion in The Godfather Part II.

Nashville focuses on the wannabes, successes, and has-beens who drink out of the same pond in the figuratively incestuous Tennessee town of the title. That describes the whole "plot," as it were: Altman obviously sees parallels between the country music Mecca and Hollywood, where people also get off the bus or airplane thinking they've reached the end of the Yellow Brick Road. Nashville is a largely anecdotal film that basically unfurls as a series of set-pieces--at an airport, in a traffic jam, at a barbecue, in the Grand Ole Opry, and, finally, at a concert for unseen "Replacement Party" candidate Hal Phillip Walker. There are three-tiers of stardom in Altman's Nashville: the Opry performers, including Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), a man with stubborn pride in his perceptions of Nashville ("You don't belong here," he tells a long-haired studio pianist); the neo-hippies, the boys and girls whose songs incorporate elements of folk protest; and the peripheral players, guilty of fame by association.

But what is being said? Maybe that celebrity, in the media age, is the new class divider. Those without it have the potential to kill for it. (Witness a sub-plot which predicted--and warned against, Altman will have you know--John Lennon's assassination, a politically veiled act that allowed David Mark Chapman to absorb some of the icon's celebrity, forever ingratiating himself in discussions of Lennon's legacy.) It may sound a trifle obvious, but there is the assertion that capturing the public's imagination is the American Dream: in the closing minutes of Nashville, when our unassuming villain is aiming his kill shot, he takes an affirmative glance not at his victim but at the stars-and-stripes backdrop behind her. Wasn't Franklin J. Schaffner driving at a similar message in the prologue to his Oscar-winning Patton?

I may be imposing meanings on simple anthropology. Indeed, no less than Roger Ebert recently asked, "What is it about?"--and came up empty, if you ask me. Pauline Kael chose to obsess, for the most part, over the beautifully-sketched characters, who do not grandstand the way they do in soaps, the way they do in the cross-narrative Magnolia. In my favourite passage of her review, Kael points out that sumbitch Hamilton is the only guy who steps up to the plate once the shit hits the fan, a moving reversal of expectations that proves if nothing else that Altman has the courage to not be reductive. Shouldn't we?

If Anderson, as we'll see, is a ringmaster (he even goes by P.T., evoking the name of a certain circus mogul), then Altman is a zookeeper. Anderson, the hyphenate behind Boogie Nights and the equally fine Hard Eight, understands that chance encounters in movies never fly, so he braces you for the San Fernando Valley-set, three-hour ode to coincidence that is Magnolia with a dazzling opening sequence that underlines the film's basic theme: "strange things happen." In quick succession, the filmmaker recounts a 1911 murder, the death of a scuba-diving casino dealer, and the homicide of a man in mid-suicide. The karmic overtones of these three random acts of violence are absurd--we'd only believe them in life if they were related to us in that reliable fashion that begins urban legends: "This friend of mine knows a guy who...".

A blaring TV announces the arrival of the story proper: all of Magnolia's characters are at least peripherally connected with the television trade, and, unlike with Altman's quasi-documentary approach, they each receive formal, fourth-wall-breaking introductions. Game-show producer Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) is afflicted with terminal cancer, as is Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), the emcee of his most popular program "What Do Kids Know?" Earl's estranged son is Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), a wildly successful host of pick-up seminars ("Seduce and Destroy") for sexually frustrated men. Jimmy's estranged daughter is Claudia (Melora Walters), a sometime-prostitute with a fearsome, photogenic coke habit.

Christian cop Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly) will eventually meet and court Claudia. The police officer, like Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), a former quiz-show contestant, is at first an object of ridicule, an earnest stumblebum given to bouts of transparent bravado ("Watch the mouth!"). The two men generate pathos when the truth of their shared loneliness comes to the fore. ("I have so much love to give," Donnie wails, "I just don't know where to put it.") Adolescent Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) is the image of Donnie at the height of his fame: the child is a reigning "What Do Kids Know?" champion and, mainly due to pressure from his greedy, boorish father (Michael Bowen), on the brink of a breakdown.

Lastly, there are Earl's caretakers: Linda (Julianne Moore), his hysterical trophy wife, and Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a devoted nurse--he, too, is single, sparing no love for anyone but Earl. The old man's last request is a reunion with his only child, so Phil dutifully hangs on the phone forever with Frank's handlers. Regrettably, the film's prevalent black character, a rhymin' kleptomaniac, falls victim to stereotype. Perhaps he wouldn't have, but his thread was all but deleted in post-production.

One gathers from watching the pop mess that is Magnolia that Anderson has cobbled together every stray idea that ever landed in his imagination in a Frankenstein that borrows its basic shape from Altman's apocalyptic Short Cuts. The film includes a gut-wrenching corker of a musical number in which the characters sing along, in divergent locales, to Aimee Mann's pseudo-inspirational "Wise Up." (Nine of Mann's tunes adroitly grace the soundtrack.) While the film's aggressively unpredictable bent makes room for such playfulness, it also paves the way for an irksome climax: an unforeseen event, guaranteed to blindside cold audiences, lets the air out of the tire, so to speak. Artistically liberating in that it lets Anderson off the hook at an especially tense juncture (let's just call it what it is: a deus ex machina), this final freak occurrence doesn't go far enough in mirroring the mysteries outlined in Magnolia's preface--it lacks a sense of destiny, of cosmic symmetry.

At least the conclusion is beautiful to behold--cinematographer Robert Elswit at peak performance. (The film is more visually ambitious than anything Altman himself has done since maybe Quintet.) His camera is more patient, but no less animate, here than elsewhere in the picture. Anderson has encouraged Elswit and editor Dylan Tichenor to pace Magnolia, for the first two-thirds, like a coke binge. This risky, channel-surfing approach keeps us sharp and is utterly appropriate, considering the content: the extended family members on display are children of the boob tube and have built boxes around themselves. I gather that, because he has called Magnolia his most personal effort in interviews, Anderson's scope of experience does not range beyond dealings with entertainment-industry types, for Earl's turf is only two steps removed from that of Boogie Nights' porn czar Floyd Gondolli. Fortunately, the lonely feelings on parade in Magnolia are universal.

Or are they? The film is so obnoxious, so much the emotional bully, that to sit there unmoved is to resist Chinese water torture. Yet, whereas I will never forget the shame that came over me while watching Gwen Welles' forced striptease in Nashville, a rape by committee, little of Magnolia resonates beyond Mann's memorable contributions, because every last feeling it elicits comes telegraphed and pre-digested--you react because it's visceral, not because you're really connecting with it. It is, as friend and online critic Travis Hoover is fond of saying, "emotional pornography," effective yet shamelessly exploitative and difficult to get off on unless it's in front of you. In the end, the only thing Magnolia has in common with Nashville and the remainder of Altman's body of work (and hey, I'm happy it is its own thing), aside from the structural debt to Short Cuts and the oblique casting references of Henry Gibson and Julianne Moore (a carryover from Boogie Nights, yes, but also a veteran of Short Cuts), is its impenetrability. But compared to Nashville, Magnolia is the Emperor's New Clothes; it's a hollow film that deserves hollow praise.

Magnolia is alas the stronger DVD because it offers slighty more insight into moviemaking than does the Nashville disc. Both are letterboxed at 2.35:1 (well, 2.40:1 for Magnolia) and enhanced for 16x9 displays. Video quality is strikingly good on Nashville, not at all hampered by the film's drab colour scheme. (Is it me, or did seventies movies consciously avoid green hues?) Detail is ultra-fine and print damage is minimal. By contrast, Magnolia looks newer, though not necessarily better: the Anderson-/Lou Levinson-supervised transfer is a hair too dark. Of the two, Magnolia can't be beat for Dolby Digital 5.1 fireworks. A song has never sounded so dynamic pouring out of my speakers as during Mann's cover of "One," while Nashville's remix mostly respects the integrity of its original mono track--though crowd scenes and the more boisterous songs drift into the surrounds. The LFE is a non-issue on Nashville but it's used prevalently in Magnolia's biblical storm climax.

Altman provides feature-length commentary and an enlightening interview segment on the Nashville disc, and I enjoyed each on the level of trivia. Altman told Walker's "campaigners," for instance, to invade filming whenever they pleased for that documentary touch. A trailer is also attached. Magnolia's major supplement is a 75-minute "video diary" from Mark Rance entitled, I think, That Moment, which concentrates on the 100+-day shoot, although pre-production (during which Anderson showed Network to his crew) and awards ceremonies are also covered. I do wish that the editing process and/or the creation of Mann's "Save Me" clip had been touched on in greater depth, however, and in place of a bizarre Method workshop-sketch between Anderson (a dream subject in that he always seems to be "on") and girlfriend Fiona Apple at that. Still, Rance's intimate portrait is exciting, and conveys the laboriousness of production marvellously. (That said, where's Tom Cruise?)

Magnolia's 2-disc set also offers two excellent anamorphic trailers accompanied by powerful 5.1 audio, nine TV spots, Mackey's seminar clips assembled with additional footage as an "Instructional Video" (plus the notorious Tom Cruise commercial that was not ready for prime time), the full "Save Me" video, and extensive outtakes (indexed in each platter menu as "color bars"). The whole shebang arrives handsomely-packaged in a gatefold slipcase.-Bill Chambers

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
160 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.35:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English
DVD-9
Region One
Paramount

Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada

DVD VITALS:
Running Time
188 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.40:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English
DVD-9 + DVD-5
Region One
New Line

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Published: August, 2000