Love him or hate him, Tom Cruise was robbed of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, albeit small, in this multilayered patchwork of a film by master filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master). In a movie about lonely Los Angeles that crisscrossed over a dozen characters, Cruise's performance was both hilarious and heartbreaking. Perhaps his best scene is during the seminar when he tries to keep his cool with an extremely taut smile wrapping his face, only to go nuts in the end - just like in real life (couch jumping, anyone?) Magnolia, so named because the story unfolds like a flower, corralled some of the best actors of our time. Besides Tom Cruise, the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, and John C. Reilly play sympathetic - if somewhat pathetic - characters trying to connect or reconnect with the people in their lives. The unconventional narrative that ping-ponged back and forth between all these personalities was truly a breath of fresh air at the multiplex back in '99, and was something that really hadn't been done - at least not this effectively - since Robert Altman's heyday. Also, there are frogs. Anderson's inspiring, 3-hour opus would give rise to more movies featuring intersecting storylines, like the Oscar winners Traffic, Crash, Syriana, and Babel. Unfortunately, this also meant we got the romantic clunkers like Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve. Oh, well. You take the good with the bad.
Michael Perone has written for The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore City Paper, The Island Ear (now titled Long Island Press), and The Long Island Voice, a short-lived spinoff of The Village Voice. He currently works as an Editor in Manhattan. And he still thinks Michael Keaton was the best Batman.
