Their developing relationship may be the film's single most hopeful note. And yet, because you also see them apart, struggling with their demons, you know they're in for more trouble than they know. 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. This absence seems inevitable in a world that's all about switching channels.
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.