You'd think that during this Oscar season I'd make sure I got out and saw more movies. You'd think the overwhelming desire to make sure I've seen as much as possible would get me away from the computer and out to the theaters, waving my expired student I.D. in front of the hapless box office workers (because full-price tickets now cost $8.50) and plopping down in the less-than-cozy seats to experience what many are calling the most interesting batch of films to grace any recent winter movietime.

One of the reasons I haven't is that the two movies I just had to see first are both supremely long. One is 3 hours, the other is 2 hours forty. To go to one of these movies after work was daunting, so I never pulled it off. And my weekends have been filled with laziness of all kinds.

Ah, but this past weekend proved to be fruitful. I saw both Magnolia and Topsy-Turvy. Six hours of movies to atone for my negligence in providing you with reviews. Hail Mary!

Well, I fall more on the like side. Sorry, Guys Who Hate It. I see why this movie can gain one's dislike, because it's long, ponderously slow at times, and, on the surface, useless. A big "Who cares?" hovers around this movie. Who cares about these annoying people? Who cares what happens to them? Who cares?

Well, I cared. For the most part. Magnolia is a slow-burn movie. You can sense even as the movie begins that each of the 402 characters will be having a life-defining moment right before your eyes. For some of them, the moment lasts most of the 3 hours. For others, the moments come in a smaller flash. But everyone has a moment, and most of them were intriguing to me. Oh, except for Melora Walter's Claudia and Julianne Moore's Linda. I didn't much care what happened to them.

[NOTE: Since this movie's been out for so long, I will not be trying to be vague, which means I'll talk about some things you might not want to know if you haven't seen the movie yet. Skip to the last paragraph if you want a summary, or just pop on down to the Topsy-Turvy review.]

Magnolia is filled with some amazing performances. The most talked-about, of course, is Tom Cruise's. He plays Frank Mackey, a macho stud muffin boy who's made it rich teaching non-politically-correct seduction techniques to gullible men around the country ("Worship the cock, tame the pussy" about covers the syllabus). Tom deserves the applause he's getting--and his Golden Globe Award for best supporting actor--not only because he plays a character we've never seen him play before, but because he does it well. There is a moment I thought he was going overboard near the end of the movie when he finally visits his dying father, Earl Partridge (Jason Robards). But Tom is otherwise relaxed and at home in this movie, completely not how he was in Eyes Wide Shut. This sleazeball of a guy is incredibly immature and emotionally stunted. Behind his steely gaze and his merciless banter, Tom shows you there's something more to Frank, that this is not who he is, it's a front. And when he's "attacked" by Gwenovier, the interviewer played by April Grace, he refuses to deal with what she's presented to him about his true past, and he clams up for the rest of the interview. Immature, definitely. But there's a reason for his immaturity, as there's a reason for every character's actions in this movie. Some of these actions seem to come out of nowhere (Jimmy Gator's secret about his daughter, Claudia, is one example), but they're there, which is more than you can say for most movie characters.

Philip Seymour Hoffman again proves his acting prowess. Compare his Phil Parma here with his Freddie Miles in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Wow, what a difference. Even a similar character, Allen in Happiness, is subtly different from Phil. Even Phil's life-changing moment is subtle, when he realizes he must give Earl Partridge the morphine drops to hasten his death and put him out of his misery.

Jason Robards, I think, is amazing. I'd heard he overplays his dying man character, but I think he's about as spot-on as you can get. He rambles, he shakes, his eyes wander, lost, around the room. Yet he retains the hardness he obviously had when he was well, the hardness that allowed him to leave his dying wife and young son, Frank, without looking back. Earl does not gain your sympathy--Oh, poor old dying man!--but you do come to understand him. His human flaws become intriguing, his realization that he left what he loved. A nice performance.

Another beautifully subtle acting job comes from John C. Reilly, who was in Boogie Nights (directed, like Magnolia, by Paul Thomas Anderson). John is Jim Kurring, a cop who is very into being a cop. Jim attempts to project the unflappable police man image he's created for himself, but he's a very soft, almost fragile guy underneath. He's been divorced, he's at least somewhat religious, he strives to help people, but then he tries to color all this through the stoic cop filter. Jim falls for Claudia Gator, a woman who could not seem more wrong for him. His sad yet successful attempts to woo her are charming, but sometimes painful to watch. Jim is, you might say, just a big galoot. Happily, though, his character always comes out on top. He has to struggle, but he manages. Watch when he's spilling his soul to Claudia during their dinner date. He talks about what a bad cop he is for losing his gun, something that, to us, doesn't sound too damaging, but to this guy, it's a great tragedy. Through him, we understand why this is so. Jim is a great character.

So this Claudia... oy. I saw the movie with Marcy and Ken, who said they liked her because they've known people like that. Okay, that makes sense... yet while this cokehead, wacked-out, screaming, nervous, pathetic woman may have been an interesting character, I was troubled more by Melora's acting. I didn't feel she nailed it, like so many other characters were nailed in this movie. It felt like she was ACTING, just like Tom's iffy moment at Jason's bedside. Melora hit the mark several times, but often I just thought she was just acting, not feeling the character. And so I was bothered by Claudia. Where thanks to John's strong performance I could understand how Jim would be blind to Claudia's obvious problems, I could not understand Claudia's strange willingness to go out with Jim, the cop whose very presence in her house puts her coke habit in risk of being discovered and punished. Of course the pieces were there, and I don't doubt a character like this would take this path, but Melora didn't show me anything to make me buy it.

I may as well talk about Julianne Moore now, too, while I'm on the subject of iffy acting. I think the only movie I've liked her in was An Ideal Husband (I can't remember her performance in The Big Lebowski). Otherwise, she creeps me out. In Boogie Nights (yes, she's another Paul Anderson "regular"), I was disenchanted with Julianne's acting. I thought she often rang false, like she does sometimes here. In Magnolia, she's Linda Partridge, Earl's young second wife. She's a bundle of nervous energy, spewing out forced "fuck"s constantly, and pacing and smoking cigarettes as only an actor can. Not impressive. However, she does have some good moments. Her diatribe in the pharmacy is rather nice, the lashing out of a woman who can't explain what she's about to do with all those drugs but so desperately wants to. She's also got a nice moment with Phil, when she apologizes for hitting him, and when she's just made her own decision to end her life. So she's a mixed bag here. Although she still creeps me out.

There are many other actors to mention, too: William H. Macy is effectively pathetic as Donnie Smith, a former whiz kid game show champion, all grown up with nowhere to go; Jeremy Blackman is fine as Stanley Spector, a quiz kid who's currently the champion on the same show Donnie was on decades earlier; Philip Baker Hall is nice as Jimmy Gator, a man who's hosted the quiz show all these years and who is nothing like his on-screen image; Melinda Dillon is very good as Rose, Jimmy's supportive but ultimately betrayed wife; the aforementioned April Grace is cooly composed as the interviewer who seems teetering on the edge of falling into Frank's macho spell but is in fact playing him against himself.

Paul Anderson proves again how adept he is at handling movies with complex storylines. His film allots just the right amount of time to the various stories (though some might say it allots too much time for everything!), and just when you are about to get bored of a scene or of the pacing of the movie, Paul switches gears and sweeps us back into the narrative. Magnolia has several crescendos where the drama and energy rise, and where you can't wait to see exactly what happens next or how one story connects to another. Even better is that the connections are often left to be discovered subtly by the viewer, without the annoying exposition most other movies tend to throw in. How does Earl Partridge connect to Jimmy Gator? Well, besides the fact that Earl's son's macho teachings bring one such shark into the bed of Jimmy's daughter, Claudia, a small title card on screen at the end of the game show reveals that the show is a Big Earl Partridge Production. Nice. The threads of all these peoples' lives are intricately connected, and it's a pleasure to see something like that play out.

I do wonder about the movie's opening, in which a narrator describes a couple bizarre coincidences from the past. One of them was famous from an e-mail that was circulating a couple years ago, about the kid who jumped from a building to kill himself only to be accidentally shot by his mother as he fell past their apartment window. These stories in the prologue are much more bizarre and strange than the story the movie presents, which meant I had expectations for coincidences in the main film that were more peculiar, more bizarre. The prologue misrepresents the movie slightly. The movie can speak for itself, I think.

I also wasn't fully sold on the little musical interlude. In the last part of the movie, there's a song by Aimee Mann that swells on the soundtrack along with which, quite unexpectedly, the characters start to sing. All of them. They all have a moment... within the context of their settings, of course, and not as a Hands Across America thing. The audience snickered at it, because, hey, there's the dying Jason Robards singing this song! It's goofy. However, for some characters, the singing plays fine, and it ends on quite a striking image, with Stanley, alone in the library amongst his myriad of books, finishing the song. This musical interruption is a daring choice on Paul's part, but it's only partially successful.

Briefly, I have to profess uninspired indifference toward Dixon, the little street kid who shows up here and there. Maybe my not understanding his raps had something to do with that. He's the only character whose role I wasn't sure was necessary in the movie.

So Magnolia is dark. Characters are dying, taking drugs, cheating on each other, using each other... and yet the movie ends on a note of hope. I know a few people who will argue with me about this, but it's true. SKIP TO THE LAST PARAGRAPH (before TOPSY-TURVY) IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING! First of all, there's the catalyst for the movie's turn toward hope: The frogs.

Yes, you may have heard that, near the end of the movie, there's a froggy rainstorm. Can't imagine it? Neither could I. But it works. Lord help me, as stupid as it sounds, the raining frogs was fant-- I was going to say "fantastic," but I use that word a hell of a lot (just run a search of it at my website). Let's call it something like "delightful." Okay, here's this heavy, serious movie, all the characters are reaching a pinnacle of drama, some people are about to die, others about to kill themselves, others at the very bottom of their ropes... MORBID! Then along comes this amazingly contrived plot device. A frogstorm. Frogs plopping onto cars, into swimming pools, onto people. This amphibian deluge is just the break in the norm everyone needs. This is where the salvation begins, the slight upturn in hope of the movie's emotion. It's the kind of bizarre moment the prologue had led me to expect. Some might even call the frogs biblical, God's giving these suffering people a helping hand. Maybe, but religion plays only the teensiest, tinsiest part of the movie, so I don't feel that's what this represents. I'll mention the frogs more in a bit, but first, you may be asking, "What about these positives you mentioned? Where are they?" Let's look.

Earl dies. That's pretty negative, right? Well, not really. The man is suffering, he's acknowledged the fact that he'd been a jerk, and he briefly gets to see the son he's estranged. And instead of dying painfully and slowly, he's helped by Linda and Phil with the morphine drops. Though he dies, he gets to experience some redemption, as small as it may seem to us looking in from out here.

Frank: He finally confronts his past, which he has ignored for so long, and allows his feelings for his dad to surface--all of them, the hatred and the love. The last shot of him in the movie is as he walks down the hallway in the hospital, on his way to visit Linda, and surely on his way to reconciling with her. That's very positive.

And Linda: She almost succeeded in killing herself. You may argue that she would have been happier had she succeeded, but Linda was confused and irrational. She was distressed because of how she'd treated Earl, and that she'd ended up falling in love with a man she'd married only for his money. She was going to kill herself out of guilt and because she didn't want to live off the money of a man she'd been so horrible to. But she remains alive. Frank is on his way to see her. The movie sets it up where she can come to terms with what she was feeling, just as Frank and Earl did. I believe she has a better life in store. That's hope.

There's Jim and Claudia. She refuses to believe this kind, honest man can ever like her, and she bails on him, gives up. Jim, in turn, begins to pop back into his thoughtless cop banter, ready to cover the scars with his job. But instead, after the frogs have fallen and after his conversation with Donnie, Jim decides he's got love to give, so he goes with his feelings and shows up at Claudia's to talk with her. And, in her final shot, we see Claudia with a serene, hopeful smile as another Aimee song says something about them being meant for each other.

Stanley, the quiz kid, has humiliated himself by wetting his pants during the quiz show. He's let his father down, and he's mouthed off to the game show host, Jimmy Gator. He runs away and hides himself in his school library. Post frog, he returns home and continues his stand. He tells his dad he needs to be nicer to him. His dad grumbles. Stanley softly but insistently repeats his request, and the father has the first hint that he is, in fact, going to be dealing with a new kid, one he needs to appreciate. Will it happen? Who knows. But the hope of change is there, that Stanley can be loved for himself and not his intelligence. Stanley making the stand in the first place is a big positive.

Donnie has had a particularly humiliating day. He's been fired, he's told Brad, the doofus bartender, that he loves him, and he's clumsily robbed Solomon & Solomon's safe of all its cash. Donnie's change begins to come before the frogs, but the peculiar frog event allows Donnie to talk to Jim instead of just being arrested by him. Donnie is finally able to vocalize what he wants, what he needs. If he was confused before, now he's less so because he knows what he wants. He can finally move forward.

Just look at all the hope that begins to blossom at the end of this movie! See, Magnolia's about the pain people have to go through in life, about the pain others cause us, about the pain we cause ourselves. The interaction between people can make this pain worse. But still, if we struggle to rise above all this, if we're willing to look into ourselves and be honest with who we are and admit that the emotions we have are all valid, the frogs will come, things will change, and healing can begin. This kind of emotional and personal honesty is rare and noteworthy, just like a storm of frogs. Magnolia may not have the finality of something like It's a Wonderful Life, but it does have a similar if more modern take on despair and redemption. Magnolia's not 100% successful, but it's a valiant and daring challenge of a movie. Paul has a great cinematic style (though the focus puller should be shot--WAY too many blurry close-ups!), and he has an interesting take on America. Just a word of advice: Don't watch this and American Beauty as a double feature. They may go together well thematically, but it'd be too much of The Dark America to handle for one sitting!

Well, after that monster of a review above, let's to something lighter. This is a movie about Gilbert and Sullivan, those composers of puffy musical entertainments. The movie is also by Mike Leigh, and if you've ever seen a Mike Leigh film, you know this is something quite different from what he normally does. I've only seen two of his movies, Naked and Secrets & Lies. I really didn't like Secrets at all, but Naked was a mesmerizing (AND DARK!) film. (You think Magnolia's dark, just get a peek at this doozy!) Mike usually focuses his concentration on modern, working-class subjects, so this period costume piece is a stunning break. And a very good one.

Mike does this thing where he lets the actors sort of find their characters through improvised rehearsals. He also takes moments that come out of the improvisation and includes them in the film itself. It's a very organic way of working, and I like the results. (Yeah, I didn't like Secrets & Lies... so maybe the technique isn't always successful.) He did the same thing here, and what transpires is a costume drama with a feeling of honesty to it. Instead of everyone getting lost in the costumes, the actors in Topsy-Turvy become the people who inhabit such garb, people who really did dress this way and talk this way in a society that behaved this way. It's very human. The drama of other costume movies comes from a weird sort of intangible, untouchable place, like from within a display case. I enjoy such Merchant Ivory-esqe films, but they are different altogether from what we find in Topsy-Turvy.

Just like Magnolia, Topsy-Turvy is an actors' film, and like Magnolia, the film is allowed to flow around the performances. Where some scenes and shots would definitely have been excised in the Hollywood system, here they are allowed to stay. The world of Topsy-Turvy is rich in atmosphere and character, thanks in part to Mike allowing us to see these little bits of "useless" detail.

As the main characters, Jim Broadbent (Gilbert) and Allan Corduner (the other one) are superb. Jim plays Gilbert as the most serious unfunny man in the world (thanks to Marcy for this insight). He has a talent for wit in the written word as well as the spoken, and he is often funny, but at the same time, he's deathly serious. All is business to him, all is propriety, punctuality, detail, and precision. He is a man lost in his world, and while he's not exactly selfish, he certainly is self-centered. He's driven. Jim is a treat to watch.

Allan is also very good. His supple manner of speech, his stuffily-expressed desire to be more of an artist than he is, is amusing. Unlike Gilbert, Allan's Sullivan is taken with the more wild approach to life, spending some time in France where, as we all know, perversity runs amok. Allan has expressive eyes that he uses to demonstrate his artistic longings and his artistic triumphs. He is self-centered as well, but much more congenial and friendly than Gilbert.

The pair work well with each other. It's amusing--both between these two characters and amongst the rest of the cast--to see how polite everyone must be, even when criticizing another person or demanding something of someone else. While I wouldn't say emotions remain bottled up, they certainly do get disguised in the shroud of societal niceties. To see the dramas and comedies unfolding within this envelope is another thing that gives Topsy-Turvy its charm and warmth.

I really appreciated the radiant performance by Lesley Manville as Lucy, Gilbert's wife. Most of the time, a true respect is shown between this headstrong woman and her sometimes grouchy husband. She doesn't take his B.S., and knows when to dole out her own at the appropriate times. She is strong. Yet she is also a sad woman, since Gilbert is indeed so self-centered. Though he is polite to her and thoughtful of her, his politeness keeps him out of touch emotionally. He respects her, but goes no further. Twice during the movie, Lucy, alone on her bed, her hair down, ready for sleep, reveals her neglected side. This vision of her is sad and lonely. I truly felt sorry for her. Skip this if you don't want to know, but in the end of the movie, when Lucy gives her synopsis of a play she's thought up, the real urgency of her need for her husband to show her the love that gets lost in propriety comes to a head. Lesley's acting is moving, and that she can show us both the strong woman and the needful one shows us her strength as an actress.

Topsy-Turvy has some strange gaps in it, but nothing that will make you lose your bearings. [Skip if you want to maintain some surprise.] I especially would have liked to see a scene where Sullivan accepts Gilbert's new piece, The Mikado. We merely see him go from disgruntled to happy and smiling as he works on the new project. The stink he put up all through the rest of the film about doing something more with his music seems to vanish, and while the explanation is mentioned by someone else that The Mikado has the kind of human drama Sullivan was hoping for, it would have been nice to see his moment of acceptance, that shift in his character.

The movie is very funny much of the time. A lot of the humor comes from the twit actors in the theater company. They are so vain, so theatrical, you can't help but laugh.

The movie did drag for me near the end, and I think this is because the energy of the film is fairly even keel. The triumphs are there, but seem somewhat muted. This is definitely the Mike Leigh feel. Had the energy picked up just a bit more, mine would have, too, and the dragging wouldn't have happened. Trust me, I wasn't hoping for some over-blown melodrama like at the end of Cradle Will Rock, but the emotional triumph of The Mikado's success was felt most strongly by the people up on the screen and not by me.

But that's a small quibble. Topsy-Turvy is great fun and worth seeing.

Geez. I'm getting tired of writing positive reviews. Alan suggested I see Eye of the Beholder because I would have a great time trashing that piece of junk. Hmm. It's awfully tempting...

--Steve

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