Magnolia

Magnolia is a three-hour, operatic ensemble drama tracking a dozen interconnected lives in the San Fernando Valley over a single rain-soaked day: a dying television producer, his estranged son, a drug-addled young woman, a lonely cop, a washed-up child quiz-show star. It is a work of staggering craft and naked emotional ambition — bravura camera movements, meticulous cross-cutting, a hypnotic Aimee Mann score woven through the film's very dialogue — and a showcase for what critics almost unanimously rank among the best performances of the entire cast's careers. The male lead's flamboyant misogynist-seminar guru is the turn most often singled out; the ensemble itself is routinely described as one of the great casts of the decade.

Anderson directs at maximum volume. Melodrama, coincidence, and sentiment are pushed to operatic extremes, and the film's two most famous set pieces — a mid-film sequence in which the characters break into song, and the reality-bending climax — land as either transcendence or self-indulgence depending on the viewer. Reviewers who resist the film consistently cite its length, its showy excess, and the sense that some subplots exist more for color than for story; even its admirers concede it is overstuffed, and the director has since said he made it "way too long." At the same time, the same maximalism is what its champions credit with its power: it refuses timid restraint and swings for something genuinely big.

Beneath the excess, the film is an unflinching study of fathers and children, abandonment, regret, and the persistence of the past, resolving on a note of fragile grace that the film's most serious critical admirers call genuinely moving — it has been compared, by no less an authority than Ingmar Bergman, to the best of American cinema, and one prominent critic has enshrined it among his "Great Movies." The disagreement is real and worth flagging: consensus holds that the performances and emotional sincerity carry the film through its indulgences, but reviewers split sharply on whether the climax's cosmic theatricality is a profound gamble or a spectacular miscalculation. Nearly all sides agree the film is never less than fascinating.