"Why did I happen to be at this place, at this time? Why did I meet this person?"
--Randall Adams, in THE THIN BLUE LINE

There's a world of difference in those two observations. The first (by the angel sent to save George from suicide) is a claim that the connections that we have and spin out throughout our lives have the power to change the world for the better, even when we are not aware of it. The second (by a man condemned to death for a murder he did not commit) is a claim of provisionality, of random chance that can suddenly turn our own lives around, for better or worse--often the latter.

It is curious that at a time when more and more people seem to find their lives more and more constricted by lack of choice and lack of freedom to chart their own courses that so many films seem to deal with such issues of cause-and-effect, of free will and determinism, of choice and chance. SLIDING DOORS, LIMBO, THE DREAM LIFE OF ANGELS, RUN LOLA RUN, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, AMERICAN BEAUTY are just a few.  Paul Thomas
Anderson's MAGNOLIA is another.

MAGNOLIA opens with restaged enactments--including diagrams--of chance events that involved tremendous coincidences. So, as we begin to enter the lives of 9 or 10 characters, we look for the links that will connect them and for the chance that creates the sufficient causes for connection.

There is the old man (Jason Robards, Jr.) dying of cancer, his younger wife (Julianna Moore), and his male nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman).  There's the aging quiz show host (Philip Baker Hall), his young boy genius contestant (Jeremy Blackman), the boy's ambitious and greedy stage father, and a ruined, grown-up former quiz kid (William H. Macy).  There's Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), the guru of the groin, who teaches men how to "seduce and destroy." There's a sensitive cop (John C. Reilly) who talks to himself and becomes smitten with a cocaine addict (Melora Walters). Like a game of Six Degrees of Separation, one by one the links become visible until we see them all, as one character says, as "spokes on a wheel."

But these spokes have feelings, and for all the film's oddity and the strangeness and satire that evoke laughter, especially in Cruise's dead-on motivational hustling, almost all of these characters ooze with pain. Giant close-ups of suffering faces dominate this film. Death, the certainty of death, loneliness, betrayal and torment, afflict each one in one or another. But, to take an image from another film, the ball keeps bouncing, the puzzle pieces fall into place, and even at three hours, the film does not seem too long.

(Possible SPOILERS ahead)

The hub for all these spokes turns out to be the game show, WHAT DO KIDS KNOW? And the answer to that question is the source of pain for most these adults (and one kid). But still, if coincidence of personal relationships can link lives, so can pure chance. The film ends with a horrifyingly funny event that is foreshadowed throughout the film by occasional weather updates and by the number 82 (the final clue coming in a shot of the game show audience).

The man in the cage is Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., who now lives in a cage of his own making. The son of a prison guard, Fred became fascinated as a child with the details of death row and began to seek a way to make executions more "humane." Having designed new state-of-the-art (so to speak) electric chairs (or "execution systems," as he prefers to call them) for several states, he was called upon to expand his talents (so to speak). He went on to redesign a gas chamber, although Fred himself dryly notes that the two systems are entirely different. From there, he was asked to design a lethal injection system and reconstruct a gallows, more technologies linked to the others only by their final effect.

Like so many of director Erroll Morris's subjects, Fred is an oddity. Thin, with thinning hair, an upturned nose and an overbite that give him a rabbitty appearance, he is a chain smoker and coffee addict, given to 40 cups of brew a day. Assured of his own humanitarian intentions, he has no qualms about his field of knowledge or its result. His only desire is to dispatch the guilty with a minimum of pain. 

If that were all there was to Fred, he would be interesting--and creepy--enough. Like so many of Morris's subjects, he indicts himself by his own words, unaware of the implications of what he says. For instance, according to Fred the only difference between a life-support system and an execution system is that if the first fails, the subject dies, and if the second fails, the subject lives. But that technical mindset has its own effects, and it is Fred's second career--as a professional Holocaust denier--that spells out its consequences.

When a German anti-Semite was hauled into Canadian court for distributing literature that claimed that the Holocaust never happened, Fred found himself tapped as a defense witness. Although showing no signs of anti-Semitism himself, he takes professional pride in the summons. I was the only person in the world, he asserts, who could be an expert witness. Journeying to Auschwitz (on his honeymoon!), he surreptitiously took samples from the gas chamber sites, then had them analyzed in a Massachusetts lab for evidence of hydrogen cyanide. When the lab results were negative, Holocaust deniers were (and still are) jubilant at the "scientific proof" that the gas chambers never existed.

But while Fred had found a new circle of friends to admire him, the rest of his life began to unravel. His "testimony" was discredited in court and the defendant convicted. He could no longer get work.  States cancelled contracts and he even tried to sell an electric chair in the classified ads. His wife, fed up, finally left.

If we are tempted to feel some sympathy for this pathetic little man, Morris keeps us from being too swept up in a semi-tragic tale. Intercutting in his typical way with borrowed footage, including Edison's short "Electrocuting an Elephant" and from TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, Morris also brings in *real* expert testimony that debunks Leuchter's own debunking attempts. There is the historian who shows the blueprints and memos in the archives that Fred never saw. He also points out that the very samples that Fred took probably were not part of the gas chambers and in any event would have been unlikely to be in contact with the gas.

There is also the lab technician hired by Leuchter, who did not know where the samples came from or what Leuchter was trying to prove.  Because cyanide reacts only with surfaces, he notes, the crushed rock samples that his lab used were in effect diluted thousands of times. Finally, Fred the technician is lost in his failure of technical knowledge and becomes a fixture on the neo-Nazi "conference" circuit. Even there, he is held in dismissive contempt as a useful tool by fascists like the loathsome David Irving.