by Robert Bouffard, Managing Editor
I love to engage with media that challenges my beliefs. It makes me think deeply when a film or television show presents themes or characters who are opposed to my worldview. I like to understand where other people are coming from. Understanding and engaging others’ viewpoints are essential to forming your own.
I’ve come to this conclusion largely because I grew up in an atmosphere that discouraged this oppositional engagement. The suggested way of handling this was to shelter your mind and insist that you were right, which is counterproductive.
Nowadays, I get excited when I watch a movie and love it, only to realize it has an oppositional viewpoint to another movie I love. It just serves to initiate the sort of debate and cultivation of thought that I enjoy so much. These instances show me that contrasting ideas can coexist and each thrive, which is the kind of world I strive for.
So join me as I examine two movies that send opposite messages, but which I still love just the same.
Both movies that I have chosen here explore a number of different themes. But I’m boiling them each down to how they deal with one idea in particular: determinism versus free will.
This should be an easy subject to tackle, right? Fortunately, I don’t have to make a personal judgment on the topic for the purposes of this piece. Rather, I’ll outline how the ways Magnolia and Minority Report deal with the subject make me gravitate so heavily towards these films.
It just so happens that Tom Cruise stars in both films. One, Magnolia, is the type of movie that Cruise hasn’t really made since this and Eyes Wide Shut came out in 1999. They’re character and performance driven dramas with auteur filmmakers as opposed to the sci-fi and action fare that he’s been doing for the last 20-plus years like Minority Report. On one hand, it’s a shame because I think he was great in both of his 1999 dramatic performances, but on the other, we’ve gotten movies like Mission: Impossible — Fallout and Edge of Tomorrow. But that’s not what i’m here to talk about, so let’s dive in to Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece, Magnolia.
Magnolia is a giant movie. It’s over three hours long and doesn’t have a lot of exciting action to keep you invested. That being said, it’s one of the most kinetic three-hour movies I’ve ever seen. It flows perfectly from scene to scene and character to character so that you never feel like the pacing is off.
It’s one of my favorite types of movies. You’re introduced to about 10 characters who are broken in some way and are then followed throughout the film. We’ll soon come to understand how these seemingly unrelated characters connect in the world of this story. There are a few parent-child relationships that play into the movie’s overall theme of determinism, or the idea that these people’s futures are already decided because of something that happened or a decision that was made in the past.
Each one of these characters is trying to exert some kind of control over a situation in their lives. Stanley (Jeremy Blackman) is a boy genius competing on the quiz show, What Do Kids Know? who is constantly studying all the books he can while his father (Neil Flynn) is pushing him past his limits because he wants the glory that comes along with having a child prodigy as a son. Donnie (William H. Macy) is a former champion on the same quiz show whose parents took advantage of him and took all the money. Now, as an adult, all he wants are braces because he thinks having his teeth fixed will help him find the love that he’s lacking.
Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) is the longtime host of What Do Kids Know? and is dying of cancer. All he wants as as the end quickly approaches is to reconcile with his daughter who hasn’t spoken to him in years because of his behavior towards her when he was young. Claudia (Melora Walters), Jimmy’s daughter, is directionless. She gets in arguments with her boyfriend and snorts piles and piles of cocaine. Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly) is a police officer who tries his absolute hardest, but just isn’t that great of a cop.
Frank Mackey (Cruise) is a motivational speaker who gives seminars to men on how to pick up women. Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) is Frank’s estranged father and producer of What Do Kids Know? who is also on his deathbed. His wife Linda (Julianne Moore) initially only married him for his money, but had a change of heart and wants to give it all up because she knows what she did was wrong. Finally, Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is Earl’s nurse who tries to get in contact with Frank to the father and son can reconcile before it’s too late.
All of this plays out over the course of three hours and eight minutes and it’s glorious. Broken people looking for fixes and those who need forgiveness may not seem like it’s the recipe for determinism, but it is. Each one of these characters has something that they need to confront for them to be able to make their life the way they want it to be, but because of how difficult it would be to do so, they’ve been putting it off.
But once each person decides to confront their past, frogs fall from the sky — yes, you read that right. As the narrator states, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” This is a movie about reconciliation, forgiveness, regret, and much more, but the first time I saw it, I came away thinking about how the movie was saying these things had to happen. It posits that this is the natural order of the world — we are meant to mess up and then subsequently reconcile. It’s how things work. The unified moment of catharsis when each one of the characters decides to do something about the situation they wish they weren’t in is the moment that they’re given the cosmic sign of the frogs (foreshadowed by subtly showing Exodus 8:2 throughout the film). It’s a unified moment of catharsis that seems like it was always going to happen. It was just a question of when. The film isn’t saying that everyone is a robot with no free will, but it is suggesting that each moment in our life has been determined by previous events. That we’re destined to end up where we do.
Minority Report has a very different outlook on free will though. It follows John Anderton (Cruise), in 2054 Washington DC. Anderton is the Captain of PreCrime, a law enforcement group devoted to stopping crimes before they happen. They have three people called “Precogs” in a facility where they are able to see crimes before they happen, allowing the PreCrime department to stop the crime before it’s committed by arresting the would-be perpetrator. This has kept DC virtually crime-free for six years.
The entire PreCrime department is under the impression that the Precogs are always right and that they are doing important work by preventing these crimes. But when Anderton is pinpointed as the next would-be perpetrator in 36 hours, he’s forced to go on the run to discover whether this system really is reliable.
Anderton learns from the person who created PreCrime that there exists a “minority report” — sometimes one of the three Precogs sees an alternate outcome from the other two. Obviously, this implies that PreCrime is indeed fallible. But Anderton still has to live out the next 36 hours up to the point of the would-be crime. Once he’s finally put in the position to choose between taking a life or not, he’s able to put aside everything he thought he knew about PreCrime and choose not to kill.
It’s a beautifully built up moment over the course of the movie. While Anderton is standing there pointing a gun straight at another person, he’s being told he has a choice by the Precog who most often sees something different from the others. This is a radical thing to hear, especially for someone in his position. He was the captain of this department which was entirely based off believing there was only one outcome to every situation. But Anderton finally learns that he actually has a choice in what he does.
I think I more strongly resonate with the themes of Minority Report. The idea that we’re able to make choices in our life is inherent to the human experience. But I also love that Magnolia is extremely varied in its messaging. Its idea of determinism is used for a very positive effect and I choose to see the positive side of what it’s saying.
Ultimately, I find some value in both perspectives. While it’s true that “the past ain’t through with us” and we are all shaped in some way by the decisions we’ve made and the things that have happened to us, this doesn’t necessarily mean that our future is set in stone. We all have the ability to learn from the past and choose how we will live in the future. We can’t change who we are, but at the end of the day, we do have some say in who we will become.