Magnolia, the Academy Award-nominated movie starring Tom Cruise and one of famed critic Roger Ebert’s favorite films from 1999, will start streaming on November 1. The film will become part of the library offered by Paramount+ right as the spooky season ends and awards season begins. And while it’s not a current awards-season contender, any time is a great time to watch (or rewatch) a movie this great.
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the epic drama follows multiple characters through interconnected storylines that take place around the same part of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. It is a collection of character journeys that all flow in the same direction during a very peculiar day punctuated by bizarre coincidences.
A police agent discovers love in the most improbable of moments. A former child star tries to fix his issues regarding unrequited love. A child prodigy is the victim of emotional abuse. A motivational speaker with an outrageous method is forced to look to the past. A dying man’s wife confronts the moral dilemmas of her marriage. In Anderson’s script, themes of forgiveness and love are the rule, seen through the lenses of deeply flawed characters.
Related
10 Underrated Tom Cruise Movies Worth Revisiting
Apart from major franchises like Top Gun and Mission: Impossible, the actor has worked great on films that have flown under the mainstream radar.
Tom Cruise plays Frank T.J. Mackey, a misogynist motivational speaker whose clients excitedly cheer as their foul-mouthed leader tells them how to fix their lives: just be the man you’ve never tried to be.
Cruise’s performance is undoubtedly the best of his career, and his ravishing looks are a wonderful match for his character. Mackey is charismatic, and his handsome looks are a good cover for his more repulsive qualities. Nevertheless, he’s forced to reconnect with his ill father, and Frank is broken beyond recognition. The scene where he speaks to his father again after being estranged for many years is probably the one that drew the attention of Academy members who decided to give Cruise a nod in 2000.
At the 72nd Academy Awards ceremony, Magnolia was up for three trophies, but it failed to win any awards that night. Best Original Song, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for Cruise, who has never won an Academy Award but has been nominated a total of four times. However, sometimes an Oscar nomination isn’t ultimately as important as a glowing review from one of the industry’s most important film critics.
Revisiting Roger Ebert’s Love for Magnolia
Roger Ebert, the late Chicago Suntimes critic who won the first Pulitzer prize for film criticism, hailed Cruise’s film upon release. He classically loved Anderson’s films, with The Master being the only one he labeled as average. In his review of Magnolia, Ebert celebrated Anderson for his “extroverted self-confidence that rejects the timid post-modernism of the 1990s.” The performances also captured his attention, with Cruise being the most prominent of all in a film that had tremendous turns from other actors, including Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Julianne Moore, and Jason Robards, among others.
Per Ebert’s review: “Magnolia is the kind of film I instinctively respond to. Leave logic at the door. Do not expect subdued taste and restraint, but instead a kind of operatic ecstasy. At three hours it is even operatic in length, as its themes unfold, its characters strive against the dying of the light, and the great wheel of chance rolls on toward them.”
- Release Date
- December 10, 1999