The strategy is clearly meant to disarm us, like flashing a bright light in our faces before an interrogation. Once stunned, we're drawn slowly into Anderson's cat's-cradle storyline, where various desperate souls seek reconciliation in the blue emptiness of Los Angeles.

Anderson's affinity for this kind of tragic-poetic milieu was best expressed in his debut feature Hard Eight, which explored lives delimited by poor judgement and bad memories. In his follow-up, Boogie Nights, Anderson pursued a legitimate point about the persistent value of a family structure, even in the seedy hardcore porn industry. It was buried, however, in a deluge of show-off camerawork and 70s nostalgia, all leading up to a self-consciously punishing third act.

Like Boogie Nights, Magnolia tries to pull a number of seemingly disparate stories into a single frame of reference, allowing them to reflect on and reveal one another. The problem, again, is that the stories don't quite cohere, and Anderson's transparently ambitious attempts at making connections between his characters are unconvincing. That he's blessed with an ensemble of terrific performers who go straight over the top for him is what keeps his stories afloat.

If there is a center to Magnolia's universe, it must be the deathbed of Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), the wealthy patriarch tended to by his much younger wife (Julianne Moore), of whom we suspect impure motives, and nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The characters in orbit around this private drama include ailing game show host Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), aging child prodigy "Quiz Kid" Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) and his young contemporary Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), a lovelorn L.A. cop (John C. Reilly) who courts a confused, coke-snorting young woman (Melora Walters) he meets on a domestic disturbance call, and a swaggering motivational speaker (Tom Cruise) whose scorched-earth gender rhetoric makes Tyler Durden look sensitive.

In explaining the internal miseries and failings of all these people, Anderson breaks the "show-don't-tell" rule for three hours straight. He can't help it — juggling so many stories in the air, he hasn't left himself time to develop characters and situations, and his penchant for real-time storytelling doesn't allow much room for shorthand. (Even at three hours in length, actually allowing for the passage of time might have helped this film breathe.)

So in order to make sense of the whole thing, Anderson has his characters talk, talk, talk about how they feel. Each one gets a narrative close-up, either an interminable monologue or a contrived bit of scenery-chewing — Macy blows his top at the bar, Moore rages at a disapproving pharmacist, Robards rambles from his deathbed, Spector whines about what it's like to be a kid, and Reilly pontificates about justice, forgiveness, and what it means to be a cop. Such moments can be effective tools for pulling a movie together, but they're best if disguised by the screenplay or absorbed by an actor's performance before being sprung. In Magnolia, they're lined up end-to-end and paraded across the screen like floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Only Hoffman's performance, long on humanity and short on melodrama, feels completely true and unforced.

The climactic weather event, which apes the similarly apocalyptic earthquake at the end of Robert Altman's Short Cuts, is striking and powerful, but unforgivably flip. It's proof that even when he makes his big bid for substance, Anderson just can't resist the old razzle-dazzle. Elsewhere, the film exhibits a pleasant tendency toward a stream-of-consciousness narrative, digressing at some length and then analyzing its digression, complete with circles and arrows at one point. For the film's framing device, which incorporates purportedly turn-of-the-century film footage, Anderson even broke out an old hand-cranked movie camera from the period. A couple of reels in, my realization that Anderson wasn't going to sustain that dreamy logic throughout (despite a musical interlude somewhere past the halfway mark) came as something of a disappointment.

Anderson's got a sharp eye, and Magnolia is a very good-looking movie. He shoots in Panavision, meaning that the picture has a very limited depth of field, focusing on a specific plane of action. That suits the film's structure, which throws specific people and moments into sharp relief in front of the shifting tapestry of life in the city. Because of the precision required to shoot in scope under relatively low light conditions, Magnolia's faces move in and out of focus in a few shots. While I'm reasonably certain that's accidental, it would be an interesting and defensible stylistic choice if done deliberately. Elsewhere, cinematographer Robert Elswit lovingly distorts the light, as in a sequence photographed in the rainy darkness, with the camera lens spattered by raindrops, or in a quasi-nude scene shot through one of those textured glass shower doors that turns the soft hue of flesh into an indistinct mosaic.

It's a tiresome cliché for a movie critic to complain that a film is too long, but I can't help repeating the argument here. With the exception of those delirious couple dozen minutes at the beginning, Magnolia never rushes itself; it's in no hurry. Anderson wrote a 200-page script, and he clearly intended to make a long movie (reportedly, he was asked by New Line to trim it to two hours and change; Anderson complied with a director's cut that ran 179 minutes), so I guess my problem isn't as much with the length per se as it is with the conception.

Magnolia (the title refers literally to the Los Angeles thoroughfare where some of the action takes place) is obviously a formal experiment, the result of a writer/director trying to push himself and take his audience on a revelatory journey. It contains moments of considerable beauty, terror, and insight. But the resulting tale creaks and sways under its own weight, with such momentous aspirations that the eventual soap-opera revelations of terminal illness, child abuse and all the regrets of has-beens and wanna-bes — with tunes by Aimee Mann and, gack, Supertramp — can't be anything but anticlimactic. Watching a three-hour film whose every frame is fraught with psychological tension and peril can be a curiously desensitizing experience. In the film's press notes, Julianne Moore notes that her character is "operatic." Well, all of these characters are operatic, and there's the problem.