It stars an ensemble cast, including Jeremy Blackman, Tom Cruise, Melinda Dillon, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ricky Jay, William H. Macy, Alfred Molina, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards (in his final film role) and Melora Walters.

The film is an epic mosaic of interrelated characters in search of happiness, forgiveness and meaning in the San Fernando Valley.

[2][3] Los Angeles police officer Jim Kurring investigates a disturbance at a woman's apartment, finding a body in a closet.

Jim goes to the apartment of Claudia Wilson, whose neighbors called the police after she argued with her estranged father, Jimmy Gator, and blasted music while snorting cocaine.

The newest child prodigy on the show, Stanley Spector, is hounded by his father Rick for the prize money and demeaned by the adults, who prevent him from using the bathroom during a commercial break.

champion Donnie Smith, whose parents took all his prize money, has been fired from his job due to performance issues and is in love with a male bartender with braces.

Earl asks Phil to find his estranged son, Frank Mackey, a motivational speaker and pickup artist.

"[6] Michael De Luca, then head of production at New Line Cinema, made the deal for Magnolia, granting Anderson final cut without hearing an idea for the film.

[10] Before Anderson became a filmmaker, one of the jobs he had was as an assistant for a television game show, Quiz Kid Challenge, an experience he incorporated into the script for Magnolia.

[17] According to an interview, Hall said that he based the character of Jimmy Gator on real-life TV personalities such as Bob Barker and Arthur Godfrey.

[18] The rain of frogs was inspired by the works of Charles Fort, and Anderson claims that he was unaware that it was also a reference in The Bible when he first wrote the sequence.

[6] Frank T.J. Mackey, the character that Cruise would play in the film, was based in part on an audio-recording done in an engineering class taught by a friend that was given to Anderson.

[25] Anderson is known for the use of long takes in his films that move along considerable distances with complex camera movements and transitions with actors and the sets.

[9] Some of the actors were nervous about their scene singing the lyrics to Mann's "Wise Up", so Anderson asked Moore to go first to help set the pace which everyone else followed.

Anderson ended up designing his own poster, cut together a trailer himself,[6] wrote the liner notes for the soundtrack album, and pushed to avoid hyping Cruise's presence in the film in favor of the ensemble cast.

"[6] Anderson met Aimee Mann in 1996 when he asked her husband, Michael Penn, to write the score and songs for his film, Hard Eight.

Mann's track "Momentum" is used as the loud playing music in Claudia's apartment scene when Officer Jim arrives and was also featured in the trailer for the film.

The soundtrack album, released in December 1999 on Reprise Records, features the Mann songs, as well as a section of Jon Brion's score and tracks by Supertramp and Gabrielle that were used in the film.

The website's consensus reads: "An eruption of feeling that's as overwhelming as it is overwrought, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia reaches a fevered crescendo and sustains it thanks to its fearlessly committed ensemble.

"[30] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 78 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

[35] Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B+" rating, praising Cruise's performance: "It's with Cruise as Frank T.J. Mackey, a slick televangelist of penis power, that the filmmaker scores his biggest success, as the actor exorcises the uptight fastidiousness of Eyes Wide Shut ... Like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, this cautiously packaged movie star is liberated by risky business".

[38] In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, "In the case of Magnolia, I think Mr. Anderson has taken us to the water's edge without plunging in.

I admire his ambition and his very eloquent camera movements, but if I may garble something Lenin once said one last time, 'You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs'.

"[39] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "But when that group sing-along arrives, Magnolia begins to self-destruct spectacularly.

[40] Philip French, in his review for The Observer, wrote, "But is the joyless universe he (Anderson) presents any more convincing than the Pollyanna optimism of traditional sitcoms?

[41] The Time critic Richard Schickel wrote: "The result is a hard-striving, convoluted movie, which never quite becomes the smoothly reciprocating engine Anderson (who did Boogie Nights) would like it to be.

[43] Roger Ebert included the work in his "Great Movies" list in November 2008, saying, "As an act of filmmaking, it draws us in and doesn't let go.

"[47] Later he came to consider it overlong;[48] when asked in an interview what he would tell himself to do if he could go back to when he shot the film, his response was "Chill The Fuck Out and Cut Twenty Minutes.

Fortean author Loren Coleman's 2001 book "Mysterious America: The Revised Edition" includes a chapter entitled "The Teleporting Animals and Magnolia", addressing the film.

This has led to the speculation that Stanley is a prophet, allegorically akin to Moses, and that the "slavery" to which the film alludes is the exploitation of children by adults.