That Frank's carefully repressed life-details are revealed during a TV interview is only one of many awful ironies in Magnolia. There's no compassion in his universe. Mann's delicately pained soundtrack songs hold the film together throughout. The tracks form more than a tie-in CD , demonstrating a mutually respectful collaboration among Anderson, Mann and music producer Jon Brion. In fact, this something else cannot be imagined without TV, the movie's prevailing metaphor.
Magnolia is a movie about excess that is undeniably excessive.
It's about TV, or more precisely, what TV means on an alarmingly grand scale, its lust for conflict and spectacle, its pretense of format and order. Whatever else it does, Magnolia gets all that dead right. All rights reserved.