At the End of 1999, Oliver Stone Inadvertently Passed a Torch to Paul Thomas Anderson

It was a perfectly transcendent and potentially ridiculous capper to a banner movie year. After twelve months of instant and future classics, blossoming talent and older masters, silly and terrific entertainment, plus some plain old regular bad movies, 1999 closed out with wunderkind filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson unveiling his highly-anticipated and largely mysterious follow-up to the critical darling Boogie Nights. The star-studded, three-hour Magnolia was not the final movie released in 1999; The Talented Mr. Ripley came a little later, as did Man on the Moon, Galaxy Quest, and The Hurricane, among others. But it had the air of a grand finale, and besides, how perfect was it that even after such a grand statement, 1999 would toss out several more fine-to-great titles for Christmas?

As for the question of what, precisely, the grand statement of Magnolia was and is, some critics at the time were divided. Had Anderson leveled up to a movie of even grander scope than the sprawling Boogie Nights that expanded beyond the time capsule of vintage 1970s pornography to tell a bigger, more contemporary story about loneliness, desperation, addiction, cycles of abuse, and redemption among a series of interconnected stories? Or was he blathering on excitedly, hyperactively, and/or pretentiously about not much in particular, owing to his Tom Cruise-endorsed carte blanche from New Line Cinema?

The non-answer to these questions is that Magnolia occupies a strange paradox 25 years later: Today, it is less divisively described in general – outside of Cruise and Anderson’s screenplay, it wasn’t really considered a major Oscar player after a few weeks in limited release, and less so after it made underwhelming money when it went wider in January, while I think the current broad cultural consensus is that it’s pretty great – while also appearing ever more like the work of a younger, greener filmmaker than the Anderson we know today. Even Anderson, while far from condemning his third film, said years later that he lacked the discipline to cut it down further, saying that now, he could probably lose 20 minutes from it.

Beyond the epic length, there is the movie’s frenzied energy, perhaps even more notable given how 200-minute runtimes have increasingly become a badge of honor among certain filmmakers and their fans. Compared to There Will Be Blood, The Master, or Phantom Thread, Magnolia looks messier, more frantic, more eager to show off than Anderson’s statelier (and, despite the lack of raining frogs, often more obtuse) later films. Even Licorice Pizza, his most freewheeling movie in years and one oriented directly in the point-of-view of youth, feels less purely “young” than Magnolia, maybe because its reach never exceeds Anderson’s confident grasp.

I’m not entirely convinced that Anderson misses anything in Magnolia, either, despite its obviously youthful-emo desire to communicate so many emotions at an operatic pitch. Even (or maybe especially) the bits that look and sound like the work of a particularly young guy are memorable, sometimes surprisingly wise. I’m thinking specifically of Jason Robards, playing dying patriarch Earl Partridge – estranged father of misogyny peddler Frank “TJ” Mackie (Cruise); husband of unfaithful later wife Linda (Julianne Moore); patient of nurse Phil Parma (Philip Seyour Hoffman); impresario of a TV empire that employs game-show host Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), abuser of daughter Claudia (Melora Walters), who meets cop Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly); and so on; and so on – giving a monologue on his deathbed. Partially emerging from the fog of his failing body, he speaks about his greatest regret, and his feelings about the bromide about living life without regret, excerpted here:

“The fucking regret and guilt, these things… don’t let anyone ever say to you, you shouldn’t regret anything. Don’t do that! Don’t. You regret what you fucking want. Use that. Use that. Use that regret for anything, anyway you want. You can use it, okay? Oh God. This is a long way to go with no punch. A little moral… story, I say. Love. Love. Love. This fucking life… it’s so fucking long. So long. Life ain’t short. It’s long. It’s long, goddammit. God damn. What did I do? What did I do?”

“Life ain’t short, it’s long” strikes me as the sentiment of a younger man, maybe even a naïve one, obscuring his lack of experience by placing those words in the mouth of an older character (though for all I know, Anderson took the speech verbatim from real life). But those words about the power of regret: the way Anderson pulls them from the more naturalistic ramble of Earl’s speech, the way they fail to directly address any of the people Earl has wronged but instead reach his nurse Phil, the way Anderson’s camera stays on Robards in that scene… it’s powerful writing, powerfully staged, and the movie has countless moments that equal this power as it builds and recedes like a symphony. In later films, Anderson elides certain details, refuses to spell everything out for the audience; what he does in Magnolia is arguably even more daring, allowing his wilder instincts to flourish in full view. Take a break at the movie’s midpoint to cross-cut between characters, even dying ones, singing along to the same Aimee Mann song? Do it. Have Ricky Jay deliver a prologue full of made-up coincidences in a lengthy movie-opening sequence? Leave it in. Have frogs rain from the sky in a way that seems vaguely possible but is never remotely explained? Yes. These are gestures that risk both the audience and the critics. In its lengthy, possibly drug-addled glory, the movie recalled not just Anderson’s obvious influences like Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese, but, in a oblique way, the extremely ’90s work of one Oliver Stone.

Oliver Stone isn’t talked about much these days, and not just because he hasn’t made a fiction film in some years. Though he made some interesting and worthwhile movies in the new millennium, it seems safe to say that culturally speaking, Stone was left back in the ’90s, in ways that weren’t entirely clear at the actual end of the decade. First, because several of his early triumphs were actually released before 1990; and second, because at this exact time, Stone had a mainstream hit on his hands – his biggest in ages, as it turned out. After the excellent but barely-seen Nixon and the less-excellent, less-seen genre exercise U-Turn, Stone came roaring back with Any Given Sunday, which appeared to star most of the actors who were not able to appear in Magnolia, across multiple generations of Hollywood: Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, James Woods, Matthew Modine, Charlton Heston, Aaron Eckhart, and Ann-Margaret. (Maybe they all passed; none of them have made it into a PTA joint since, either.)

Technically, this was his biggest-grossing movie of the decade, though eight years of inflation probably give JFK the ultimate edge. Moreover, people didn’t talk about Any Given Sunday the same way as JFK; it was “only” an entertaining melodrama about the NFL, not a conversation-starter about an indelible scar on the American psyche, and it was even less of an awards player than Magnolia. Stone wasn’t dropping his trademark attention to kaleidoscopic visions of United States culture (as it seemed he did in U-Turn, a bloated neo-noir), and in some ways Any Given Sunday is prescient about issues that loomed larger in the 25 years since. But the thing that really lingers about this movie is Pacino, ideally cast as a weathered football coach, giving as good a locker-room speech as has ever been given in sports cinema. To wit:

“We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me. And we can stay here – get the shit kicked out of us – or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell, one inch at a time. Now, I can’t do it for you. I’m too old. I look around, I see these young faces, and I think – I made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can make. I pissed away all my money… I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me… and lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror. You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s part of life. But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches. So is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small – I mean, one half-step too late, or too early, and you don’t quite make it. One half-second too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves to pieces for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches that’s gonna make the fuckin’ difference between winning and losing! Between living and dying!”

Oliver Stone didn’t write this speech, as far as I know; most likely John Logan, acclaimed playwright and screenwriter, has the honors. (Maybe he was subject to rewrites, but damn, if you don’t hire an acclaimed playwright for a speech like that, what’s he there for at all?) But there’s something especially touching about Stone, that boiling cauldron of American outrage, giving voice to these words of middle-aged regret, chased with an inspirational message, no less. In both this halftime speech and Magnolia’s deathbed monologue, the filmmakers indulge stagy entreaties to younger people, trying to show them how to process their regrets and failings, in a way that doesn’t feel particularly characteristic of their work before or, especially in Anderson’s case, after. (The indulgence, sure; the sentiment, not really.) In two movies with otherwise little in common, the king of American hot-button ’90s cinema briefly overlaps with the filmmaker who would become a standard-bearer for the same country with a vastly different approach to history, often immersing himself in the past rather than pointedly, actively refracting it into the present. It turned out that Magnolia didn’t need to rake in a ton of money or Oscars to keep Anderson going and make an impression on millions of fans, just as Any Given Sunday’s success didn’t really carry Stone through the 2000s. 1999 wasn’t planned out as an epochal time for American cinema, carried by some few key titles. But in film as in life, those inches add up.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.