OLR: Magnolia (1999)

I'm a pretty hard nut to crack when it comes to fiction, but this film was touching. (7/10)

d. Paul Thomas Anderson

7 April - edited to add:

Interesting, given the subject matter, that a coincidence probably affected my appreciation of the film. Earlier in the day, I overheard an old woman talking to another person. She was reminiscing about her daughter's life. It became clear that the daughter had just died from cancer. As the woman spoke with great sadness, she often expressed regret over the decisions she had made that had affected the course of her daughter's life. What if she hadn't moved? Would her daughter have gotten into a better school and lived more to her potential? Her greatest regret was never telling her daughter about a benign tumor she had removed in her youth. The woman was deeply disturbed by the idea that her daughter had inherited this propensity for cancer from her. She feared that by never discussing it with her daughter, her daughter wasn't on the lookout for signs of cancer and, as a result, was diagnosed too late. "I killed my own daughter," she lamented. "Oh, God." She voiced this tormented last statement off-and-on until her taxi arrived.

When Earl gives his speech about regret, the memory of this overheard conversation hit me like a punch in the gut. Though the details were different, the sentiment was exactly the same. The speech ceased to become just a film narration given by an actor and became something realer. I see from the IMDB that Jason Robards also died from cancer just a year after Magnolia was released. I'd imagine he knew he was sick during filming and I have a feeling Earl's authenticity came from that.

I don't believe that coincidence is anything other than seeing faces in clouds, but both certainly make life interesting sometimes.