(USA, 148 min.)
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro,
Katherine Waterston, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Jena Malone, Eric Roberts,
Joanna Newsome
“You’re gonna wanna get good and fucked up before eating
this shit,” says a waitress to Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) and his
comrade Sauncho (Benicio Del Toro) at a seaside diner where they order weird
trendy dishes and prepare for the daily munchies. Virtually everyone in Inherent Vice, both the novel by Thomas
Pynchon and the adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson, flows through the story on
about five kinds of drugs. They babble and ramble in paranoid, drugged-out
streams of consciousness, and everything blurs together like those feverishly
crazy intoxicated conversations that inevitably happen when a party makes its
way to the kitchen at 2 am and everyone’s high on something, even if it’s just
good vibes. Few films manage to leave one with a hangover, and the headache of
trying to remember Inherent Vice is
half the fun: Just what the heck actually happens?
Someone somewhere (I think) in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice says that if you can remember the 1960s, then you weren’t really there. Don’t ask for a page reference or a character name since Pynchon’s LA-noir is riotously convoluted. If nobody in Inherent Vice actually says the line, however, then perhaps that’s a point of the densely impenetrable world of the novel.
Inherent Vice
remarkably marks the first Pynchon novel to make it to the big screen. It’s a testament
to Anderson’s ambition, talent, eccentricity, and, to some extent, arrogance
that he even attempts to adapt one of Pynchon’s many supposedly unfilmable
novels. It’s even more impressive that he largely succeeds, since Pynchon’s
books are so dense, convoluted, and intricate that every word seems indispensable
for connecting the dots
Inherent Vice is
hard to follow even if one has read the book, but the convolutedness of Pynchon’s
prose finds a good counterpart in Anderson’s over-the-top approach, which runs
at a madcap pace for two-and-a-half hours of dialogue. The mystery begins (sort
of) when Doc receives an unexpected visit from his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fey
(Katherine Waterston, in what’s surely a breakout performance) after a long
hiatus. Shasta’s a little paranoid, but even a heavy toker like Doc can tell
her fear doesn’t come from drugs. Shasta asks for help and explains a wild
scenario with her boyfriend and a property developed named Mickey Wolfmann
(Eric Roberts) with whom she’s involved. Then she, the boyfriend, and Mickey
all disappear and their vanishing act leads Doc into network of drug
traffickers, hippies, crooked cops, and masseuses.
On top of the wackiness comes a layer of voiceover narration
from Doc’s friend Sortilège (Joanna Newsome), who recounts the story of Doc’s
odyssey into the underbelly of LA. Inherent
Vice thus becomes doubly convoluted since Sortilège is a wholly irrelevant
and unreliable narrator. Like everyone else in Inherent Vice, she’s on some kind of magical drugs, and much of her
story is probably a patchwork of pass-the-reefer broken telephone.
Everything kind-of-sort-of gets resolved (but it actually
doesn’t) in Pynchon fashion, and Anderson has a lot of fun playing up the hazy
ambiguity and paranoia that puffs up as Doc wracks his brain for love. Doc’s cases crisscross as the circuitry of Pynchon’s world
entwines all of Doc’s cases in some ridiculously incestuous web. One thing
leads to another and each lead in Inherent
Vice is either a springboard or a MacGuffin.
There’s too much coincidence and chance going on, a gumshoe
like Doc knows, so all the conveniences and convolutions of Inherent Vice are either some
pre-ordained miracle or cues for some major conspiracy of which Doc is the
target. Inherent Vice madly uses the
groovy openness of the 1960s as an underlying witness to each of Doc’s cases. Doc’s
current squeeze, a DA with a trendy ’do named Penny (Reese Witherspoon), is equally
prone to paranoia. Each of their encounters brings cautious over-the-should
glances as if she’s worried that she’ll be outed for not being one of the
squares.
Squares like Doc’s rival in the LAPD, Detective “Bigfoot”
Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), who sports a flattop haircut, but eats a chocolate
banana as if he’s auditioning for a gig in gay porn, are both allies and foes
in some pot-tinged nostalgia for the decade that’s passed. Bigfoot is nothing
but anger and regrets, having played by “the rules” and having nothing to show
for it, and he antagonizes Doc with a hotheaded vengeance, but is eager to help
out, as cops usually do (sort of) in film noirs, even those coloured by psychedelic
lights and hippie beads.
The film takes place just at the beginning of the 1970s, so
there’s a turn of the century vibe as the gap between the liberals and the
squares widens and some people say enough to good vibes while others are so out
to lunch with freewheeling experiments. A coke-snorting lawyer played by Martin
Short and a new-age snitch played by Owen Wilson are some of the many colourful
characters that place Doc in city that doesn’t quite know how to handle the
changes in liberty and responsibility. It’s The
Big Sleep for the “Mad Men” age with Doc as the liberal’s Philip Marlow/Don
Draper and with reefers as Lucky Strikes. Call it The Big Smoke
Phoenix gives one of his better performances since Inherent Vice caters to the
self-consciousness and inescapable weirdness of his style. His star persona
suits the stoner-hippie-and-sandals vibe of the eccentric gumshoe. He leads
another Anderson-esque ensemble full of players who embrace the mania of the
direction. (Inherent Vice, like The Master, feels more like the work of
a unique voice than of an offshoot of a renegade Robert Altman.) Brolin easily
steals the show, though, as the goofy Bigfoot, although everyone in Inherent Vice adds a shade to the hallucinogenic
funk.
One could reproduced the phone book citing everyone who
makes the drugged-out insanity of Inherent
Vice worth the infuriating madness—shout out to Japonica!—and the film is
almost always on the verge of collapsing upon its own density and strangeness.
Anderson’s Inherent Vice, however, is
like a Jenga game of adaptation. Pull one block from the bottom and put it on
the top, and the film wobbles with zanily gutsy architecture and, despite
itself, it actually works. Now can we please get The Crying of Lot 49?
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Inherent Vice is now screening in limited release.
