Magnolia is a long, ponderous, sentimental movie about the ways people are connected. We are introduced to several characters, all lonely and connected in different ways. We see how these characters’ experiences and relationships have created the situations in their lives. Some of them are nearing the end of their lives and others are at the beginning, but all of them are lonely.

We see them judging people and being judged by others. We see what they do when they interact with people and how they react to their internal ideas about how others perceive them. They feel unique, like their own problems are more terrible and insurmountable than anyone else’s. We see how they respond to those problems – some of them get drunk or do drugs or turn up the music so loud they can’t experience the reality around them. Some of them create different identities that better meet their own expectations for who they should be.

Some of them die, or are reprimanded, or continue living their lives unchanged. And some of them realize that they can only be happy when they realize that others exist, by listening, caring, and by trying to get what they want.

Magnolia is one of my favorite movies. I have spent a great deal of time watching it and thinking about what it means. But for today I’m going to focus on Tom Cruise.

Cruise gives a terrific and uncharacteristic performance. I think he’s at his best when he’s able to take his strengths – his huge, crooked smile, his energy and physicality – with a unique character that doesn’t merely feel like Tom Cruise (he of unending charisma and charm). In Magnolia he does this by playing a monster, a real-life villain who uses his intellect and skills in a way that harms our society and people. When we first see Frank T.J. Mackey it’s in an infomercial, but when we see him in the flesh his first words are “Respect the cock” followed by “Tame the cunt.”

But Mackey is also a charming and brilliant man who understands the way people react to what he does. The scenes in which he is interviewed by April Grace are incredibly captivating. We learn almost nothing about Frank’s past and why he became the person he is, but we learn everything about how he behaves around women, how he lives his life, and why he is successful.

Then we see how Frank reacts to adversity, and it is not in the typical Tom Cruise fashion of punching and kicking. He sometimes screams, sometimes seems short of breath, but more often than not Frank stares off into space, shielding his vulnerability with silence. We can see that he is in pain and also that he is angry, so full of rage that he can’t even move, and also that he is terrified that he could say something or do something that could come back to hurt him.

Last, we learn his history. The incredible thing about encountering a character in this way, the opposite sequence in which an audience typically engages with a fictional character in film, television, or literature is that when we finally do learn Frank’s past it all makes sense. We see why he would lie about who he is, and why he is so angry at his father. He sits at the bedside of a dying father and screams at him with the rage of an abandoned son and then breaks down and begs him not to go away again.

And in this last moment we finally know where all of that anger and fear from the previous scenes came from. Cruise, like he always does, takes the script and pacing and plot of the movie and makes it feel real, and here he does it with the incredibly rich and poignant source material of Paul Thomas Anderson’s screenplay.

I didn’t time it, but it looks like Cruise gets around 20-25 minutes of screen time in a 3 hour movie, which is less than some of the other main characters of Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and John C. Reilly. All of the performances are great – Hoffman’s, for example, is much more subtle but equally emotionally affecting. Some of the storylines don’t work as well – to this day I don’t really care that much about Quiz Kid Donnie Smith or know what we’re supposed to understand about the young black street tough who raps at Officer Jim Kurring at the beginning of the movie, then appears again near the end. And the best thing I can figure out about the title is that it’s something ancient, primal, and inexplicable, multi-faceted and fleeting but beautiful.

This is also the first movie in which Tom Cruise looks like the Tom Cruise I identify with from the 2000s. He’s put on a little face weight from the mid 90s (even though Magnolia was released in the same year, 1999, as Eyes Wide Shut, I believe it was shot years after) and his hair is long, befitting an odd, kind of plasticky-surfer-chic era in American aesthetics. It is also apropos to the new cultural understanding of Tom Cruise that was built over the course of the aughts – that he was, and is, a psychopath.

Next: Mission: Impossible II