The last two first-run American movies I've seen were the super-scale art movie Magnolia and the high-concept actioner Frequency. In a perfect world, these movies wouldn't exist. In a less-than-perfect world, they would exist, but I wouldn't have seen them. In a less perfect world than that, I would have seen them, but I wouldn't ever think about them again. You begin to see that there are serious flaws with the existing setup.

The same unlucky person accompanied me to both films, and after Frequency, trying to cheer us up, I remarked, "At least it was better than Magnolia," and my companion agreed. I knew all too well why Magnolia was on my mind. I had promised the editor of Hermenaut's Web site that I would write about the film, and I was regretting this rashness. To do a responsible job of it, I figured I'd have to see the damn thing again, and if watching it once had subjected my sensibility to an almost unendurable assault, watching it again would be like having my brain sucked out by one of the creatures in Fiend without a Face.

Later I had a revelation: seeing Frequency had reprieved me from having to sit through Magnolia again—because these two New Line releases, as disparate as they may seem on the surface, have so much in common as to be, in effect, the same film. Maybe the unexpected connections between Magnolia and Frequency can tell us something "important" about the American cinema today.

1. Magnolia and Frequency are both one-word titles. They look to be about the same length, although on closer inspection Frequency has one more letter. That doesn't matter, though, because Magnolia has one more syllable, unless you elide the final two, the way my dictionary tells you to do. But the mere fact that the comparison between the two can turn out so contentious proves an underlying similarity. Not to belabor what may seem a minor point, but what we have with these two films is two titles both characterized by an indeterminate, or at any rate disputable, polysyllabicity. Which says that these movies are being packaged as offering ambiguity, complexity, and above all, perhaps, a certain elasticity. Plus, the titles both end on vowel sounds, suggesting openness. So these titles imply that these movies have a certain level of ambition and they are going to stretch us.

2. Both these movies are in Scope. I don't know why we still call it Scope. Do they still call it Scope in "the industry"? By Scope I mean shot and, with any luck, projected, in a widescreen aspect ratio of 2.35:1. If ever there were two movies that didn't need to be in Scope, these two are they. (And a third is American Beauty.) During the '80s and much of the '90s, Scope was generally reserved for action movies. Why are so many movies now being made in Scope again? Scope was introduced, the legend goes, back in the '50s as a way of luring people back into theaters by offering things you couldn't get on TV. Now that you can get Scope on TV, sort of, through letterboxing, what's the deal?

Let me suggest that these movies are in Scope for the same reason that they have those polysyllabic titles, to convey a certain elusiveness and expansiveness. In particular, the main reason Magnolia, at any rate, was made in Scope is probably that the filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson, was thinking of Robert Altman, in particular Nashville and Short Cuts, and I don't remember whether Short Cuts (the Magnolia of its day: i.e., a bloated, ugly, terrible movie about characters conceived for short stories) is in Scope but Nashville definitely is. Altman uses Scope in Nashville to convey a floating, confused-yet-connected quality of human interaction. He extends the space around the characters to indicate their potential for enlarged experience and unpredictable encounters. And Anderson tries to do the same in Magnolia, which like the two Altman films I mentioned has a vast number of major characters, not all of whom know each other, some of whom end up meeting and some of whom don't. Unfortunately, Anderson isn't particularly inventive at staging and composing for Scope. I mean, I'm not asking for Vincente Minnelli, but long stretches of the film (which by the way is a long film, three hours) are nothing but crashingly conventional one shots and two shots of people. Nor, despite his obvious debt to Altman, does Anderson even try to achieve the intrashot complexity of Nashville. (There's a notably elaborate and tricky Steadicam shot in Magnolia but calling it complex would be an overstatement; ostentatious, self-aggrandizing, and pointless is more like it.) The impression of complexity in Magnolia comes from the juxtaposition of different characters and their stories, not from anything that happens visually within a single scene. So there's something pretentious about Anderson's making Magnolia in Scope. It's like deciding that you're going to write your things-to-do-today list in blank verse ("Then get some money at the ATM/And blow it all on used CDs and bratwurst").

As for why Frequency's in Scope, I think this director, Gregory Hoplit, wanted to do, on some level, an old-fashioned domestic melodrama, like Minnelli's The Courtship of Eddie's Father or even Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause. I don't really think Hoplit was thinking about Minnelli or Ray but when you make a movie about a family, about family crises, a large part of which takes place within the home, which invites or discourages certain kinds of encounters, well, you are in Minnelli-Ray country, and those movies are in Scope. Does Hoplit do a good job with Scope? Does he justify making the film in Scope, does he survive the comparison with his implicit models? There are two answers to this question. One is: No, and the second one is: Even if he did, he couldn't, because what he's doing is so different as to make the comparison pointless, much more pointless than the comparison between Anderson and Altman. Frequency is a fantasy about restoring the family unit, father-mother-son. Now this happens to be precisely the subject of Rebel without a Cause and The Courtship of Eddie's Father. But Frequency is a baby movie, that's all there is to it. I mean, the kid in Courtship of Eddie's Father (now a bad director himself, Ron Howard) was a young kid, maybe seven or eight, and the movie was about how a kid that age sees things and there was a real tension between his point of view and the point of view of the father, and everything that was good about the movie (not even one of Minnelli's best) played on this tension. In Rebel without a Cause you had an adolescent point of view, with its internal tensions. But in Frequency, you have no tension. The family itself is OK; it's forces outside the family—whose relationship with the family is purely accidental—that are bad and threatening, which the family must defeat.

3. In Frequency, Dennis Quaid plays a NYC fireman. It's 1969. He has a wife and a young son. Cut to 1999, the father is long dead and the son (Jim Caviezel) is now a depressed loser on the police force. Fiddling with his dad's old ham radio, he makes contact, via a time warp, with his father in 1969. It doesn't take long for the two of them to get past an initial awkward phase, and soon the '99 son tips off his '69 father on how to avoid his historical death in a burning warehouse. But their meddling with fate accidentally prolongs a serial killer's reign of terror. Now dad and son must continue rewriting history in order to keep mom (Elizabeth Mitchell) from falling victim to the killer.

The central mechanism of the movie is simple. The disintegration of the family is shown to be a catastrophic loss that has wrecked Caviezel's life. He's given a what-if option: what if his father didn't die? The consequences at first seem to imply that, in the tradition of fantasies about cheating death, a price must be paid, a cosmic balance preserved: if the father survives, the mother must die. But Hoplit and screenwriter Toby Emmerich refuse to accept this: they are going to take their reparation fantasy to its nauseating limit and nothing is going to stand in their way. I hope nobody minds if I give away the heart-clutching ending: Mom survives, and there they all are, the whole family, safe and sound in the Clinton era.

Now as it happens Magnolia is about the family, too. It's the converse of Frequency: they both posit the nuclear family as an ideal, and both show that when things go wrong with the basic family relationships, the child suffers in later life; in Magnolia, things go wrong because of the sins of the father, not out of dumb luck as in Frequency. To be sure, Magnolia isn't as simple-minded a restoration fantasy as Frequency, but it is a restoration fantasy just the same. In one of the film's plots, through the persistent efforts of an angelic male nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Tom Cruise is reunited with his dying father (Jason Robards)—and even though Cruise spends most of the meeting cussing out the old man or crying endlessly, and the father is pretty out of it on morphine, a reuniting it is even if you can't call it a reconciliation, and it's clearly just the catharsis Cruise, who's an asshole, needed, and we're left to think that maybe he'll be a better person from now on. The final section of the film gives the two other families in the film an encouraging shove forward. Coke-ridden Melora Walters rejects her molester father (Philip Baker Hall), but maybe she¹ll start a new, better family with compassionate cop John C. Reilly. And little Jeremy Blackman points out to his selfish dad (Michael Bowen) that he shouldn't be such a jerk. Now I'd be misrepresenting the film if I didn't make it clear that an important part of Anderson's strategy is not to pose any of these denouements as unmitigated happy endings. But in terms of the film, they function as multiple happy endings just the same. They indicate hope, hold out the possibility of renewal. Which those who like the film may say is a more mature, honest, intelligent version of a happy ending, a happy ending for hardened realists. But in terms of all we've been through (did I mention that this cry-fest is three hours long?), given the way the film is structured, with its enormous emotional build-ups, given the expectations it has established for some big windup about humanity and stuff, is there really any mistaking the last, uh, movement of Magnolia for anything other than the equivalent of Frequency's family restoration—i.e., utter sentimentality?

4. The presence of nurses in both films surely indicates the quality of emotion the films are appealing to. The nurse is a key figure in both films' recuperative fantasies. Again, Magnolia wins out easily over Frequency in the mature, honest, intelligent game by making it a male nurse. But by being so utterly, positively, selflessly good, Magnolia's nurse succeeds in detaching the nurse function from gender and becoming all the more clearly an instrument of healing. As such, the nurse is linked to the denial of death that takes place in both films: overtly in Frequency, covertly in Magnolia through the omission of death scenes for the two stricken fathers. Denying death means a second chance for everybody—which obviously the filmmakers think is what their audiences want to hear about.

5. Both films present male violence directed against successive, interchangeable women: Cruise's phallic cult in Magnolia, the serial killings in Frequency. The portrayal of male sexuality in these films knows only one positive form: the domesticated sexuality represented by Quaid in Frequency and the cop in Magnolia. There's also a third form, asexuality: passive and benumbed in Frequency's Caviezel and William H. Macy's aging child prodigy in Magnolia, and spiritualized in the nurse in Magnolia. The failure to imagine masculinity, or the sense that masculinity is decrepit and deprived of options, obsessively haunts both films. Frequency, which apart from its other reactionary projects is also a male-bonding film, compensates for this despair by having the father and the son form a loving, exclusive relationship, to which the wife/mother is clearly secondary.

6. Both movies are about the link between childhood and going back in, or freezing, time. The game show in Magnolia has a curiously retro atmosphere. It's stuck in time, it feels like a '70s game show more than like a show that would be on now. This is—I hesitate to call it a plot point, let's just say it's something that the film accounts for: the Macy character was, as a child, a famous contestant on the same show that's still running and that the kid goes on. Similarly, part of the point of Frequency is the permanence of its social relationships: not only do the family members stay the same over 30 years, but they remain surrounded by the same group of friends. The view of the past—and, especially, the present—in both films is resolutely ahistorical, not linked to larger social or historical events (the pushbutton evocation of "the sixties" as images on TVs in parts of Frequency merely confirms the total isolation of the characters and the story from history).

7. History, having first been banished from the films, is readmitted under two forms: the game as history (history-as-game) and family history. Both movies have games in the present and in the past: Macy's big game show and the current game show with the kid in Magnolia; and in Frequency, the 1969 World Series and the ball game at the end. The game, with its ritual settings, its rules, its stylization, is the key form in both films not only for the visualization of the past but for the possibility of conceptualizing, even of remembering the past. In Magnolia, the game show is also presented as a kind of child abuse, especially in the greedy father's treatment of his whiz-kid son (and Frequency gives its own version of this situation, when Quaid, teaching his son how to ride a bike, lets go of the bike prematurely in an attempt to force the kid to balance himself). The obsession with games is a major source of the hermetic, isolated, unreal quality of both films.

8. That rewriting of the past which is overt in Frequency also takes place in Magnolia: Macy steals money from his employer, then he is allowed to return it. Magnolia holds out the possibility of an act without consequences, an act that can be undone. This reversibility shows that the ahistoricism of these movies is directly linked to their fantasies of redemption and reconciliation.

9. A subtext of both films is the basic goodness of the middle-class blue-collar guy. Cops in both movies are sympathetic characters. It's the cop (Reilly) who benignly lets Macy undo his crime. (Frequency also has an evil cop, perhaps provided as a safety outlet for antiestablishmentarians in the audience.) It seems unnecessary to point out how the emphasis on the good cop reveals the films' underlying conservatism, since in Frequency the conservatism isn't underlying, it's on the surface, while in Magnolia it's always ready to well up.

10. Chaos plays a major role in both films, giving them a potent New Agey gimmick and mainly bolstering the denial-of-responsibility motif. The Fortean prologue of Magnolia cues us to look for the oneness underlying the film's confusions, whereas the crucial coincidence in Frequency—the presence of the nurse to prevent the death-through-negligence of the hospitalized killer—is the grain of negativity in the film's bubble.

11. Both films hinge on unusual atmospheric conditions: the shower of frogs in Magnolia, the unusually bright northern lights in Frequency. These disturbances are intended to show that people are part of a larger pattern or subject to inexplicable causations. Ultimately they suggest a benign view of the universe and a sense that people are not in control of their destiny.

12. Both films are notable for egregiously protracted uses of montage to build to highpoints. Recollecting in tranquility, it's hard to judge which sequence is more annoying and offensive: the climactic game show in Magnolia (in which the cancer-ridden host unravels at the same rate as the poor kid's unrelieved bladder fills up) or the intercutting of Quaid's warehouse ordeal with Caviezel's anxiety in a bar in Frequency, culminating in the shameless slow-motion rhyme of a tumbling helmet and a dropped glass. These dragged-in hyperbolic montages are special effects, designed to turn painlessly schematized action sequences into show-stopping metaphysical spectacle; they're childishly overformalized displays of virtuosity, expressing the filmmakers' contempt for their characters and for their audience.

13. Obtrusive music. This may be a tenuous link, but it should be mentioned as symptomatic. Both films have two kinds of music: "movie music" (the maddening Philip Glass-like score that carries on nonstop for what feels like a hour of Magnolia, the string-laden claptrap in Frequency) and song (Aimee Mann's songs in Magnolia, the '60s top-40 stuff in Frequency). In each film, song serves as an optimistic, unifying device, whereas the movie music merely fulfills its usual function of filling in the blanks where something is supposed to be going on, but isn't, on screen.

Are these connections just coincidences, or do they point to a vast cinematic pattern that we can only begin to grasp? And which film is worse, Magnolia or Frequency? The only reasonable answers are: possibly, maybe, and Magnolia is worse because it's longer. I predict a new film, Freaknolia, in which a car cigarette lighter allows characters in the year 2000 to affect the results of a Jerry Vale concert ticket giveaway on the radio in 1970, resulting in the fact that now everyone has a hundred million dollars but is dying of cancer. Maybe they can go to outer space to find the cure, or something. The title has no meaning, which is a selling angle.