Last month, I watched Magnolia for the first time, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film and big follow-up to Boogie Nights. It’s a long movie at 3 hours, so it took me some time to get into it, the first hour mostly felt like exposition and setup before it got deeper into the story. There was a lot going on with so many characters, and I did have to remember who were the kids of Jason Robards and who were the kids of Philip Baker Hall. I thought it was generally very good, very epic, even if I didn’t really feel connected to several of the characters or their story arcs.
Melora Walters was my favorite, as a young woman named Claudia using drugs and forms of self-harm because she was sexually abused by her father as a kid, and is scapegoated by the family as the problem daughter because of her addictions. I just found her to be sweet and sensitive, and loved Walters’ portrayal.
In the whole movie, this was one of my favorite scenes, where she is on a date with the awkward cop John C. Reilly (who also was one of my favorites in this movie, next to William H. Macy and Philip Baker Hall), who initially came to her apartment on a noise complaint before they eventually bonded, and she’s embarrassed to tell him that she’s a cocaine addict, was abused, and anything else that she fears he will reject her for. It’s a really sweet date between two nervous people, and I adored their performances in this scene.
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