Some films you watch; Magnolia happens to you. Paul Thomas Anderson was barely out of his twenties when he made it, flush with the success of Boogie Nights and granted the rarest thing in Hollywood — final cut and a blank cheque to follow his nerve wherever it led. What he came back with was a three-hour-plus ensemble film about coincidence, cruelty and the long shadow fathers throw over their children. It is messy, grandiose and almost unbearably alive.

The structure is its dare. Over a single rain-grey day in the San Fernando Valley, nine lives ricochet off one another: a dying television producer and the trophy wife drowning in guilt beside his bed; the grown contestant and the boy prodigy from his quiz show, one washed up and one cracking under the weight of being a genius; a tender, hopeless beat cop; a coke-raddled daughter; the game-show host hiding a monstrous secret; and, presiding over the whole thing like a smirking demon, a self-help guru who sells men a gospel of contempt for women. Anderson cross-cuts between them as if conducting an orchestra, trusting that the rhymes will surface on their own.

A film built like a piece of music

Robert Elswit’s camera never stops moving — it sweeps down corridors, prowls behind characters, races to keep up with people who are running out of time. Jon Brion’s restless score and Aimee Mann’s songs aren’t decoration; Anderson has said the film was written around Mann’s music, and you feel it in the way scenes breathe to her phrasing. Dylan Tichenor’s editing braids the nine threads into something closer to a fugue than a plot, building and building toward a release no first-time viewer sees coming.

The film’s most audacious move is also its most beloved. Two and a half hours in, with every character at the bottom of their own private well, Anderson stops the story dead and has all nine of them — alone, in separate rooms across the city — sing along to Mann’s Wise Up. It should be ridiculous. Instead it is transcendent: the moment the movie stops pretending to be realism and admits that it is, and always was, an opera about pain. Either it breaks you open or it loses you completely. There is no middle ground, and Anderson knew it.

A still from Magnolia (1999) — Magnolia (1999), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

The performances that hold the storm together

Tom Cruise has never been better. As Frank T.J. Mackey — the strutting seduction guru barking his gospel of contempt at a room of desperate men — he weaponises his own movie-star confidence, then lets it shatter at a dying man’s bedside in a scene that earned him an Oscar nomination and remains the bravest thing he has ever done. Around him, Anderson fields a murderers’ row: Julianne Moore, raw and unspooling as the guilt-stricken Linda; Philip Seymour Hoffman, all gentleness as the nurse Phil Parma; Philip Baker Hall and Jason Robards as two dying men squaring up to what they did; William H. Macy as the heartbreaking former ‘Quiz Kid’ Donnie Smith; John C. Reilly and Melora Walters finding grace in two lonely, damaged people. Nobody coasts.

And then it rains frogs. The Valley sky simply opens and amphibians fall by the thousand, smashing windscreens and rooftops while the characters look up in terror and wonder. Anderson seeds the Biblical reference — Exodus 8:2 — in the margins of nearly every frame, but refuses to over-explain it. The frogs are a judgment, a cleansing, a cosmic joke, a reset; they are whatever the moment demands. It is the kind of swing-for-the-fences gesture that defines the film: you either accept that strange things happen all the time, or you don’t, and Magnolia asks you to decide in real time.

Why it endures

The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin and three Oscar nominations, but its real legacy is the permission it gave — to Anderson, who would go on to the tighter masterpieces of There Will Be Blood and The Master, and to a generation of filmmakers who saw that an American studio movie could still be this naked, this excessive, this willing to look foolish in pursuit of feeling. It is not a perfect film. At 188 minutes it sprawls, it overreaches, it occasionally mistakes volume for depth.

But its imperfections are the imperfections of ambition, not laziness, and a quarter of a century on it has lost none of its force. Magnolia is about forgiveness — for our parents, for our children, for ourselves — and it earns that enormous subject the hard way, by putting nine broken people in front of you and refusing to let you look away. A flawed, overwhelming, essential American film.