Magnolia

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

STARRING: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Jason Robards DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas Anderson OPENS: Dec. 17 in N.Y.C. and L.A.; wide Jan. 7

Paul Thomas Anderson is out to prove the obvious: that we live in a chance universe, that coincidence and mishap play a larger role in our destinies than we like to think. In Magnolia he intertwines four disparate (but equally glum) stories of people living in California's San Fernando Valley and shows how they touch--or fail to touch--one another in the course of a single, very long day.

The result is a hard-striving, convoluted movie, which never quite becomes the smoothly reciprocating engine Anderson (who did Boogie Nights) would like it to be. Indeed, only one of his tales is fully persuasive. That's the one about the Partridge family, which is not to be confused with the nice folks from '70s TV. The patriarch, Earl (Robards), is dying of cancer, a metaphor for decay that Anderson likes too much. Earl's trophy wife (Moore), who married him for his money, has decided she actually loves the old guy and is in a guilty frenzy to prove it. He, meantime, is desperate to reconcile with his estranged son (Cruise), who, under an alias, runs viciously sexist seminars teaching men how to have their way with women. Earl has a nurse (Hoffman) who tries to get everyone what they want before it is too late.

Everything about the Partridges rings tense and true--Moore's brilliantly rendered hysteria, Cruise's near parodistic charisma when he's leading his group and, even more astonishing, the way his biographical falsities, his emotional denials crumble under probing from a gently persistent TV interviewer. Anderson knows and feels for these people in some true, instinctive way.

Everyone else in his movie is, by comparison, an easy construct--a TV host with a guilty secret; his damaged, drugged out daughter; game-show contestants, current and has-been, wrestling with the consequences of brief, cheesy fame; a bumbling cop betrayed by his good nature. These characters are all well played, but we don't fully connect with them. Or, finally, with an endless movie that mostly mistakes inflation for importance.

--By Richard Schickel