After a publishing career of more than 50 years, Thomas Pynchon has finally allowed one of his novels to be filmed. Inherent Vice, which has been adapted and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is all about a stoner private detective named Larry “Doc” Sportello in 1970 southern California, called in by an ex-girlfriend to investigate the sinister disappearance of her married lover. It is an occult mystery upon which Doc attempts to shed light using the torch he still carries for her.
The resulting movie is a delirious triumph: a stylish-squared meeting of creative minds, a swirl of hypnosis and symbiosis, with Pynchon’s prose partly assigned to a narrating character and partly diversified into funky dialogue exchanges. Each enigmatic narrative development is a twist of the psychedelic kaleidoscope.
It’s as if Anderson and Pynchon have teamed up to grow something new under arc lights and plastic sheeting, like a cortex-manglingly strong hydroponic version of the dope on the page. Anderson has tweaked the seriocomic register and ensemble staging of his own earlier pictures such as Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and with cinematographer Robert Elswit, production designer David Crank and composer Jonny Greenwood, devised something intensely pleasurable to watch and listen to. It is a riff on freaks and straights, counterculture and counter-revolution, conspiracy paranoia and drug anxiety. It toys with the concept of noir incomprehensibility as a form of dope disorientation, and indulges an unfathomable Christian theme of resurrection. There is a very real interest in spanking and oral sex.
The inherent virtue is comedy: this is dreamier, more deadpan and often sadder than Anderson’s last two movies, soaked in the plaintive lilt of Neil Young, beautiful and strange. Doc is played by Joaquin Phoenix, in one of his more restrained performances – although his involuntary shout of horror at a photograph is the film’s single tonal misstep. Doc is a bleary, sideburned innocent abroad, propelled into the story when he is literally awoken from a nap by the girlfriend he hasn’t seen for years. He reacts with just the gentlest of smiles, and he never reacts at all when people greet him with: “What’s up, Doc?”
His lost and future love is Shasta, tremendously played by Katherine Waterston, who tells him about the disappearance of her wealthy paramour, property magnate Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). Investigating this imbroglio will involve Doc’s current girlfriend, assistant district attorney Penny (Reese Witherspoon), vindictive LAPD cop Detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), and a dentist, Dr Blatnoyd – underplayed by the excellent Martin Short – with possible links to suspected drug-front company Golden Fang.
It is a sunlit noir, with all the restraint and coherence of a Marx brothers movie. (One fleeting shot discloses the existence of a street called Gummo Marx Way, and surely the real-life LA will now wish to introduce this, perhaps at the same time as Anderson gets his Hollywood Walk of Fame star.) Doc himself is a dropout cousin to the heroes of Polanski’s Chinatown and Altman’s The Long Goodbye – more these figures, I think, than the Dude from the Coens’ The Big Lebowski. The plot is increasingly chaotic and elusive and arbitrary, but no more so than The Big Sleep. It doesn’t add up, but it doesn’t quite not add up, either. Inherent Vice largely does without the skeleton of narrative; instead it is pure flesh, pure sinew, pure tendon, pure texture.
At times, the movie will appear to allude to Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, with that suspect property company despoiling the deserts of southern California, and at other times Doc is like Captain Willard in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, heading far upriver and steeling himself for a succession of hostile figures, with no guarantee of any solution to the mystery.
But despite points of comparison and influences, what really comes across is the film’s sheer, exhilarating differentness. Anderson is broadly faithful to the novel, though he jettisons its section set in Las Vegas and excises most of its cinephile references – although he keeps in a line about “Jimmy Wong Howe” – and, perhaps sadly, we lose Pynchon’s surreal anglophile allusions to George Formby and Maggie Smith. Yet even with something as ostensibly conventional as a literary adaptation, this movie is so distinct from everything and everyone else, and watching it is like encountering a higher order of film-making, more advanced and evolved. The mystery of Doc’s lost love has a freaky power, but also delicacy, melancholy and charm. I can’t wait to see it again.
Comments have been reopened to time with this film’s Australian release.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion