On the structural logic of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) and what it's attempting.

Magnolia is three hours and eight minutes long, follows nine major characters across a single day in the San Fernando Valley, and ends with a rain of frogs. It is an attempt to do something specific: to create the feeling of a city as a unified organism of pain and coincidence.

Anderson uses parallel editing throughout, cutting between storylines with a rhythm that accumulates rather than intercuts. By the time the film reaches its climax, the audience has been in each storyline long enough to have genuine investment, which means the climax — which brings all the storylines to their crisis simultaneously — has a combined emotional weight that no single narrative could achieve.

The frogs are from the Book of Exodus and they are a formal statement rather than a narrative event: the film has spent three hours showing us a world of accumulated damage and unresolved guilt, and the frogs are the world acknowledging that accumulation. They are a metaphor made literal, which is something cinema can do that no other narrative form can.

I understand why people resist Magnolia. The film's ambition is visible in a way that can feel like arrogance. But the ambition is earned by the precision of the three hours that precede the rain.