Julianne Moore‘s fragile and foul (or is it foully fragile?) trophy wife in Magnolia has a whopper of a break-down/snap at while getting a drug prescription filled out at a pharmacy in Magnolia. Her character and this scene in particluar is like a very, very aggressive riff on her introverted wilting flower character in Todd Haynes’ Safe (a movie that might possibly be the best American film of the 1990s). Note the somewhat upbeat and amusing yet driving musical score in the background here. Certainly another American director that specializes in this sort of laugh-and-empathize-with-the-character-simultaneously style is Alexander Payne, but he has yet to achieve a scene as riveting as this in any of his films. There is so much guilt and truth and emotion (and visual information in the form of body language) in this scene. Quite simply, it does the great thing that movies can do.
The scene gives the viewer the context of why she melts down (as in pharmacists are condescending jerks), yet also puts them in the shoes of just seeing some half-crazy person tee off in a pharmacy. People that would have you look away in awkward social embarrassment (as in ‘whoa, back off there lady, too much!’) in real life, yet it is all so riveting on the big screen. Like reading Elmore Leonard novels. Lowlifes and recovering burnouts that you wouldn’t give a second glance to, or steer clear of them completely now become like ‘best friends’ from reading about their scheming trials and tribulations. Furthermore, if you ever encountered Bubbles from HBO’s The Wire, you probably wouldn’t even give him loose change, yet he is perhaps the stand-out sympathetic/compelling character in a show full of fascinating individuals. Magnolia may be one of the great reminders that melodrama and art-film are not mutually exclusive (Hmmm, there’s Haynes and Moore again with Far From Heaven). In the end, I just love Ms. Moore in full-on unhinged mode and it is unlikely this scene will ever be topped in her career.
(Note: Before you click below, Fair Warning on the Strong Language in this Scene.)
Oh yeah. PT Anderson seems to bring the best out of Moore. While she’s great in her own right, he somehow gives her really strong characters to go over the top with… case in point: Magnolia. Agreed that this is probably the highlight of her career.
As for this scene; admittedly she maybe over reacts a bit, but those pharmacists are assholes. That guy’s suspicious glances over his shoulder are a bit over played and he no right to be saying the things he does. A quick phone call is of course warranted, but otherwise those guys are dicks.
However we already know how unhinged she is from the scene prior to this with her shrink (“shut the fuck up shut the fuck up, shut. the. fuck. up. Now you should REEEALY shut the fuck up”).
This whole movie is stellarly put together and almost any scene is worthy of a Finite Focus feature.
Which is why I hilited this scene which somehow stands out (although people seem to always remember those frogs for some reason) amongst literally dozens of great scenes and performances.
As to the ‘over played’ – Remember — MELODRAMA, it’s kinda the point that everyone here is being played to 11.
Oh I’m not complaining. I get it. It just goes to the point that I want to punch that guy in the head.
Bubbles and Naked’s Johnny, two guys you would stay clear of if you saw them coming towards you on the street.
can I just say, quite randomly, I am already in love with Daniel Day Lewis’ character in There Will Be Blood, if only by the way he delivers the line: “…these… people”. a misanthrope after my own heart.
Good call on Johnny from Naked. You’ve got to know that that film is coming up on Finite Focus in the future. I think you probably know the scene.
I like “Safe” as much as the next guy (I guess, unless the next guys is Kurt Halfyard) but best film of the 90′s! That’s insanity. Show your work sir!
MAGNOLIA is one of my favorite films of all time, and Julianne Moore does give an excellent performance as the stressed-out wife who has finally fallen in love with her dying husband. In this film, her character is going through a string of intense emotions, mostly because she never really cared for her husband until he became sick, and now she hates herself for her past indifferences. She melts down a few times (with the lawyer, talking to the home nurse [played by Philip Seymour Hoffman]), but these are merely warm-ups to her explosion in the pharmacy.
PT Anderson handles this scene brilliantly. First off, he’s given us, the audience, the entire backstory as to what this woman is going through. Her husband is dying, and the guilt of that is tearing her apart. She is ready to crack. When the pharmacists, who know none of this, begin to eyeball her suspiciously, making side remarks in an attempt to find out why she needs such strong medication, we cringe because we know something they don’t: this woman is ready to blow. Because of what we know, we resent the pharmacists, who admittedly go too far in their handling of her. But can we fault them completely in this day and age of fake prescriptions and drug addictions, for being suspicious of so many prescriptions for such strong medication?
Anderson here presents a scene that’s probably happened thousands of times, in thousands of pharmacies all over the country: Pharmacists becoming suspicious of a prescription they’re being asked to fill. But when it happens this time, we know they are completely in the wrong, and that the person they’re eyeballing is a cauldron of emotions ready to boil over. Unlike the pharmacists, we know the tirade is coming, and we hate them for bringing it on, for putting her through yet another emotional meltdown.
Anderson is one of the best at building his characters, then moving them convincingly through intricate stories, forcing them into one confrontation after another. Along with Julianne Moore, we have the story of Stanley, the little boy genius. Didn’t you just want to punch his father? Then there’s Donnie Smith, the former boy genius, whose parents stole all the money he won on the game show. Claudia is a drug addict, mostly because her father, game show host Jimmy Gator, molested her as a child, and she has a violent confrontation with him at the beginning of the film. In short, MAGNOLIA is a film of conflicts, of characters who , in one evening, must face the reality of their lives.
When the frogs begin to fall, it’s not so much an odd event as it is a divine intervention. Finally, something happens to take everyone’s mind off their troubles. And because these troubles are so intense, it would probably take something like frogs falling from the sky to do it!
Rusty.
For Starters…
The Malaise of Modern Society, the self-help end of things, (i.e. the cult-like post me-decade) and the overall alienness of SAFE all cry out at the western world beginning to eat its own tail. Sure Fight Club, Memento, even The Double Life of Veronique all mine the same territory pretty well too.
There is something about SAFE that just gets right under my skin.
(Oh and I can show my work – This from my Screening Series Blog when I showed this film almost a year ago to the day –
http://kurtscomment.blogspot.com/2005/11/kbt-presents-safe.html
” Are you allergic to the 20th Century? ”
In Todd Haynes’ significantly overlooked 1995 film it is quite possible that Carol may indeed be allergic to living in the modern world. Carol is quiet, unassuming, and to be honest, more than a bit vapid. She does not smoke, drink, or pop pills, in fact she refers to herself as a milkoholic. She is the second wife of a well-off executive-type and stepmother to his young boy. She keeps the upscale California household running by telling the various maids and such what to do. Other than that, exercise classes, visits to the salon, and ordering furniture pretty much round off her existence. So unnoticed and uninvolved, she practically blends into the wallpaper, even while having sex with her husband!
When she begins to mysteriously ill (trust me, you will never look at getting a perm the same way again), and her doctor asserts multiple times that nothing is wrong medically, nobody knows how to react. Blame and frustration from her husband, casual ostracization from her social circle, but perhaps most significantly, a confused victim hood from herself. Salvation lies (of all places) in an infomercial from a benevolent clinic in the middle of the Texas desert which helps people who are, in fact, allergic to modern living.
While both the concept and the plot may sound like a Movie-of-The-Week, director Todd Haynes approach to the film is most certainly not. Safe is part pitch-black satire of the shallow 1980s rich California ‘modern living’ lifestyle (Yes, the movie was made in the 90s and set in the 80s), part anxious melodrama (even bordering on horror), and lastly, (not too subtly buried in the subtext) part AIDS allegory. The film itself never fully makes any judgements on what is really the cause or the cure, instead opting to leave everything open to interpretation. Thus, Safe takes the exact opposite approach of the typical Movie-of-The-Week that generally has more answers than questions.
Julianne Moore, just graduating from cliched supporting roles in junk like The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Body of Evidence and into more interesting films like Short Cuts and Boogie Nights, brings an effective sense of creeping panic to the role, but also allows the bleakly comic tone of the film to come through as well.
I’ll say this: “happy birthday” is on my list of scariest moments in cinema ever. I had to take bath after that. And I bathed in self loathing.
It’s a great film, one that’s stuck with me years after I watched it. But it lacks for a distinctly cinematic quality present in other american 90′s films such as:
goodfellas
pulp fiction / resevior dogs / jackie brown
jungle fever / clockers / malcolm x
fargo / lebowski / barton fink / millers crossing / hudsucker (I like that one)
naked lunch (qualifies on a technicality, a canadian biopic about an american author)
one false move
dead man
boyz in the hood (I know it was decades into his career but I still think this is Fishburn’s breakout performance).
Well, the list goes on and on. Also, there’s no need to insult the honor of Hand That Rocks The Cradle, a fine woman in peril genre picture. In fact, it might be the best american film of the 90′s.
“Hand That Rocks The Cradle, a fine woman in peril genre picture. In fact, it might be the best american film of the 90’s.”
Wow. That’s an interesting statement. One I would never go along with. However I too quite liked “Hand” at the time it screened.
Rusty, you kill me. I bow to your mockery of my ‘best of’ pontifications.
I’m amazed that Curtis Hanson went from schlockity-schlock of Hand that Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild to the classy and shaggy one-two punch of L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys. Then again, he’s back to In Her Shoes and Lucky You. So What to make of Hanson as a director?
I’m with you on Dead Man, Miller’s Crossing & Fargo, Goodfellas, and I’d even throw up Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, The Thin Red Line, Ed Wood, The Ice Storm and yes, even Fight Club.
Heck, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, The Big Lebowski and Hudsucker Proxy, True Romance, Waiting For Guffman and Starship Troopers are certainly some of the most fun.
I’m a huge Cronenberg fan, and even as a fellow Canadian, I still can’t quite bring myself to second THE NAKED LUNCH though…
Er. Oh yea. Add Peter Weir’s FEARLESS to the mix there too. And Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys and Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas While You’re at it. Heck, Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas.
I really like Magnolia as well, but I am no big fan of Julianne Moore, and I definitely do not agree that this particular scene is somehow better or more engaging than anything in About Schmidt or Sideways, both of which are better movies than Magnolia. Magnolia has some weak parts in bot acting, editing and composition, and some of the characters just seem too convenient and thus seem unrelatable.
All of this heated discussion and I have a small admission to make: I’ve had “Magnolia” on my shelf for over a year and *still* haven’t seen it.
My shame is great.
On the other hand, I have seen Haynes’s excellent “Far from Heaven” (though “Safe” is one I need to catch up on)…
Kurt, fuck yeah Ed Wood and Out of Sight. I’ll trade you a Total Recall for a Starship Troopers (a great film in it’s own right) and a Boogie Nights for a Magnolia because I just can’t warm up to that film.
Also the documentary work of Ross McEllwee and Zwygoff’s Crumb. Menace II Society. My Own Private Idaho. And I consistently love Gummo (aw, no he didn’t), Three Kings, Being John Malcovitch, Bad Luitenant.
Do you know they made a bunch of really cool, low key, indie vampire movies in the 90′s: The Habit, The Addiction and Nadja. All great.
Anyways, I got us way off topic. Where’s the moderator.
I think the lesson of Curtis Hansen’s career is that it’s really hard to find your niche in Hollywood and even harder to keep it.
Also, “Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary”
I’m on board with Crumb (one of my favorite docs of all time) and I’d forgotten that Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant was in the 1990s! oi! Three Kings? Yummy too. I Heart David O. Russell, even when he throws temper tantrums at his actors.
the scene from ‘Naked’…
“the time is nye bry”
‘Safe’ is a strong contender for best american of the 90′s… but Thin Red line, Before Sunrise, and Do the Right Thing are my heavyweights.