The Great Movies III

In one beautiful sequence, Anderson cuts between most of the major characters all simultaneously singing Aimee Mann's "It's Not Going to Stop." A directorial flourish? You know what? I think it's a coincidence. Unlike many other "hypertext movies" with interlinking plots, Magnolia seems to be using the device in a deeper, more philosophical way. Anderson sees these people joined at a level below any possible knowledge, down where fate and destiny lie. They have been joined by their actions and their choices.

And all leads to the remarkable, famous sequence near the film's end when it rains frogs. Yes. Countless frogs, still alive, all over Los Angeles, falling from the sky. That this device has sometimes been joked about puzzles me. I find it a way to elevate the whole story into a larger realm of inexplicable but real behavior. We need something beyond the human to add another dimension. Frogs have rained from the sky eight times this century, but never mind the facts. Attend instead to Exodus 8:2, which is cited on a placard in the film: "And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite your whole territory with frogs." Let who go? In this case, I believe, it refers not to people, but to fears, shames, sins.

Magnolia is one of those rare films that works in two entirely different ways. In one sense, it tells absorbing stories, filled with detail, told with precision and not a little humor. In another sense, it is a parable. The message of the parable, as with all good parables, is expressed not in words but in emotions. After we have felt the pain of these people, and felt the love of the policeman and the nurse, we have been taught something intangible, but necessary to know. That Paul Thomas Anderson thinks and creates in this way is proven again in his There Will Be Blood (2007). It is another film with an enigmatic ending, one that Magnolia teaches me I will have to think more carefully about.

-How long were you married?

-I am still married.

-I mean, it didn't last long, did it?

Yes, it did: half a day and a whole night.

Bombs fell as Maria was married to a soldier named Hermann Braun, with the wedding party scrambling for safety. Then came more years of the war. Whatever happened to Maria Braun during those years created a woman who is strong and cruel, sad and indomitable. She is so loyal to her husband of less than a day that she kills for him, and so pitiless to her lover of many years that she drives him to death.

All the time she is keeping score: nylons and cigarettes at first, then a good job, fashionable clothes, a house in the suburbs, expensive restaurants. At the end, her desperate lover, who is also her boss and has made her rich, tries to get a word with her; as he talks, she continues to enter numbers into an adding machine.

The Marriage ofMaria Braun was made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1979, near the end of a career so short and dazzling that it still seems incredible he did so much and died so young. Fassbinder made at least thirty features, or many more if you count his television productions, including the fifteen-hour miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz, and he did it all between 1969 and his death at age thirty-seven in 1982.

Some of his early work looks homemade ("We didn't know what we were doing, and it was like a game," remembers Hanna Schygulla, who starred in twenty of his films). Despite his production of two to three films a year, he was not a hit-and-run improviser, but a stylist who often worked with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus to create elegant, mannered visuals. His great influence, he said, was the German director Douglas Sirk, who fled Hitler and in Hollywood made a series of silky melodramas (Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows) in which, one critic observed, the characters seemed to glide within invisible glass walls that kept them from touching. Fassbinder's later films looked like elegant studio productions, although even Maria Braun, perhaps his most expensive, cost less than si million.

Fassbinder's world was one in which sex, ego, and money drove his characters to cruelty, sadism, and self-destruction. It is never difficult to discover what they want, or puzzling to see how they go about it. His occasional gentle characters, like the old woman in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), are eaten alive. The suggestion is that the war years and the postwar years wounded the German psyche so profoundly that the survivors wanted what they wanted, now, on their terms. Fassbinder himself was cruel and distant to those around him, particularly those who loved him, and in Maria Braun, he created an indelible monster who is perversely fascinating because she knows exactly what she is doing and explains it to her victims while it is being done.