Last week, I had the pleasure of seeing an early screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's new film Inherent Vice, which comes out stateside this Friday, December 12th, and everywhere else January 9th.
Let's throw my biases out on the table: I was invited to this screening by my professor who literally wrote the book on PT Anderson. I love movies about the '70s (re: Almost Famous) and I think Joaquin Phoenix is a genius (re: that one time everyone thought he was going crazy and starting a hip-hop career, but really it was all just character work for a movie). On the other hand, I've never read Inherent Vice or any novel by Thomas Pynchon, although I guess I probably should. Great! Now that that's over, let me tell you what I thought.
I fuckin' loved it. It might be the longest movie I've ever seen, and it was not perfect by any means, but boy oh boy has PTA done it again.
Inherent Vice follows Phoenix's drug-hazed private investigator, Doc Sportello, who gets wrapped up in an elaborate scheme involving neo-Nazis, the FBI, and the LAPD when his ex-girlfriend, played by Katherine Waterston, asks him to look into the disappearance of her boyfriend. The film is very funny, which helps because it clocks in at nearly two and a half hours. Not that I expected anything less from PTA or his favorite Director of Photography, Robert Elswit - but it's a stunning film to look at.
Between the jokes and the cocaine are characters like Detective "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, Sauncho Smilax, and Puck Beaverton, among many, many others. The dense narrative was clearly compressed from an even denser novel, but in the true style of noir detective stories, coherency of plot is not always a priority. If you're looking for something that absolutely prioritizes clarity of events over everything else, maybe don't go see a film in which the protagonist has to endlessly search through a cloud of pot smoke just to find his hemp sandals. I mean, go see the movie anyways, but it would probably ease your mind to read the book first. With the omission of a side-trip to Vegas, the film is (apparently) very true to the novel, having Pynchon's own signature of approval. I'll be honest though, it took a lot of focus to really understand what was going on, and when I got home, I immediately read the plot summary on Wikipedia just to make sure I got everything (mostly) right. But, again, it seems purposeful that the story lacks rigidity when it is dealing with a listless counterculture and a self-medicating generation trying to cope the maddening condescension of "the man." Just sayin'.
Nevertheless, the whole film is shrouded is a light fog of reefer madness, and I could reasonably see how anyone might come out a little confused. The film is challenging, but worthwhile, imho. Phoenix, Waterston, and Josh Brolin deliver stellar performances. Despite how much you might want it to be, Inherent Vice is not a companion film to Boogie Nights. It really is a very comedic film with blissfully dark and morally unsavory undertones. Brolin's Detective Bigfoot is such a marvelous creature of crippling masculinity and unconscious repression. My professor aptly pointed to this excerpt from the book which the film thematically underscores:
"...Coy and I, all we saw was the freedom – from the endless middle-class cycle of choices that are no choices at all – a world of hassle reduced to the one simple issue of scoring."
