2.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, graphic nudity, sexual content, constant drug use and occasional violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.23.15
This deranged flick is best
imagined as an unholy love child spawned by Chinatown and every Sam Spade
novel Dashiell Hammett never wrote.
Glimpsed through a peyote haze.
Thomas Pynchon is challenging
under the best of circumstances, which also can be said of director/scripter
Paul Thomas Anderson, whose oeuvre features aggressively peculiar films such as Magnolia, There Will Be Blood and The Master. Put these two eclectic
minds together, and the results are far from the best of circumstances.
At its better moments, Anderson’s
take on Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is a funny pastiche of 1940s film noir
atmosphere and attitude, filtered through the drug-hazed cheesecloth of 1970s
hippiefied Los Angeles. The characters are manic, the dialog heightened far
beyond stratospheric visibility, and the unfolding plot a crazy-quilt
conspiracy that gets more flamboyantly, hilariously preposterous by the minute.
You can’t help admiring the
self-indulgent audacity ... except, well, too much rapidly becomes way too
much. The stoner somnambulance through which every character delivers his lines
becomes trés tedious, and a tedious film wears out its welcome long before the
clock winds down on its 148-minute running time.
Anderson, it should be noted,
never makes short films. He should consider doing so.
Pynchon’s 2009 novel exists in
the same seemingly random, psychedelic fever that was typical of Richard
Brautigan’s work in the 1960s and ’70s. If so-called “free jazz” is music
without melody, then Brautigan’s prose was words without context: sentences
strung together solely to befuddle and amuse. Brautigan was adored by the
counter-counter set, who no doubt found his books far more compelling when read
aloud under the influence of LSD.
Inherent Vice is similarly
haphazard, with bizarre characters wandering into our protagonist’s landscape
like the pink elephants that haunt somebody enduring delirium tremens. We must
consider Pynchon’s history: As we’re reminded in a delightful December analysis
in the Los Angeles Times, Pynchon’s third novel, 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow, won the National Book Award ... “and caused the Pulitzer Committee to cancel
that year’s fiction prize after it found the book ‘unreadable’ and ‘obscene.’ ”
Inherent Vice is somewhat more
coherent, but that’s not saying much. Indeed, it could be argued that the
entire story is a marijuana-induced nightmare experienced by main character
Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix): In other words, nothing that we see is
real. The film dares us to imagine this from the very first scene, as Doc views
the unexpected arrival of former girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Wilson) with
surprise, and she murmurs, almost to herself, “Thinks he’s hallucinating.”
That notion likely will make the
film work better for some viewers, but it’s too easy an explanation. More
complicated is the possibility that some of what we see is real ... and some
isn’t.
I’ve serious doubts, for example,
about the actual existence of Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), who both narrates this
saga — providing indispensable linking commentary that helps us over the rough
spots — and serves as Doc’s sounding board. Eventually, it seems odd that
nobody else seems to interact with Sortilège, suggesting that she’s the
personification of Doc arguing with himself.
Perhaps.
The story takes place in 1970 in
the fictitious oceanside community of Gordita Beach (which, for those of us who
grew up in Southern California, bears a striking resemblance to the Manhattan
Beach where Pynchon lived in the 1960s). Doc is a slacker private detective who
probably lucks into just enough cases to keep him well stocked with grass,
which he enjoys abundantly during his off hours. Which are plentiful.
Shasta Fay, long unseen, wanders
back into his life with a wild tale of getting sucked into a larcenous scheme
that even her laissez-faire sensibilities finds unpalatable: She fears that her
current lover, über-wealthy and sleazy real estate mogul Mickey Z. Wolfmann
(Eric Roberts), is being groomed for the funny farm by his sexpot wife, Sloane
(Serena Scott Thomas), and her current lover.
Before Doc can fully digest this
scenario, he gets another case from Tariq Khalil (Michael Kenneth Williams), a
Black Guerilla activist who made the mistake of getting involved with a member
of the same Aryan Brotherhood gang that — surprise, surprise — works as
bodyguards for the aforementioned Wolfmann.
Yet another client pops up:
former heroin junkie Hope Harlingen (Jena Malone), who wistfully asks Doc to
uncover the truth about her missing husband, surf-rock saxophonist Coy (Owen
Wilson), believed dead but ... perhaps not.
Doc doesn’t get far before he’s implicated
in a murder: a development that gladdens the heart of former boyhood pal
Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), now a police detective working
at Parker Center, who’s only too happy to play rough with poor Doc. Ah, but Bigfoot
isn’t destined to be that lucky; Doc’s get-out-of-jail-free card is maritime lawyer
Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro), who springs our hero and spins an unlikely
yarn (like we haven’t heard plenty of those already?) of a San Pedro-bound
schooner re-christened the Golden Fang.
Oddly enough, “Golden Fang” also
is the corporate name of a consortium of dentists who may have their teeth in
the international heroin trade. They’re personified by cocaine-snorting Dr.
Rudy Blatnoyd, D.D.S. (Martin Short), who has become an unpleasant Svengali to
a young woman (Sasha Pieterse, as Japonica Fenway), whom Doc once “rescued” from
a drug cult.
Nibbling around the edges are FBI
agents Flatweed and Borderline (Sam Jaeger, Timothy Simons); Jade (Hong Chau),
manager of a dubious massage parlor dubbed Chick Planet; Crocker Fenway (Martin
Donovan), a lawyer known as “the Dark Prince of Palos Verdes”; Petunia Leeway
(Maya Rudolph, all but unrecognized), Doc’s sorta-kinda receptionist, who
secretly loves him; and Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon), a deputy district
attorney who serves as Doc’s occasional “flatlander” bedmate.
And no doubt several others, but
one does tend to lose track...
For poor Doc, confusion rapidly
turns into heightened wariness; as the saying goes, being paranoid doesn’t mean
that the world isn’t out to get him. But he doggedly marches on, occasionally
scrawling screwball notes that better reflect his state of mind, than anything
having to do with the increasingly labyrinthine case.
You can’t call much of what the massive
cast does “acting,” since almost everybody delivers lines in a slow, sleepy fog
that reflects Doc’s often addled sensibilities. The one exception is the
eternally stoic Brolin, who tears into Bigfoot’s tough-cop talk with the
ferocity of a hyena devouring a recent kill.
Bigfoot also has a tendency to,
ah, enjoy chocolate-covered bananas with an intensity that can only be called
carnal, which merely heightens HIS weirdness.
Phoenix gets considerable mileage
out of his vacant stares and s-l-o-w double-takes: all of them well-timed, many
of them quite amusing. But two hours-plus of such line readings quickly becomes
b-o-r-i-n-g.
One scene, however, is a
stand-out: a confession of sorts by Shasta Fay, who gets pretty far into a
blend of self-analysis and seductive desire before we realize that Anderson and
cinematographer Robert Elswit are orchestrating another of their impressively
long single takes ... made even more remarkable by the fact that Wilson handles
the entire scene stark naked, fully exposed to the camera, without ever
breaking concentration. We cannot help but marvel at her focus and intensity.
Ultimately, though, the entire
film collapses under the weight of its own precious pretentions. Pynchon and
Anderson aren’t the first to layer post-WWII pee-eye tropes against the
psychedelic ’60s; Elliot Gould was wholly unconvincing as Raymond Chandler’s
Philip Marlowe in director Robert Altman’s 1973 take on The Long Goodbye, which updated the action to that same era. Didn’t work, for all sorts of
reasons.
Neither does Anderson’s Inherent
Vice. It’s one of those odd films that impresses during its impudent first
act, suggesting great things to follow ... but then becomes a dull, dreary slog
that has us eyeing our watches and the theater exit, desperately awaiting an
opportunity to flee.
A genuine hallucination, one
imagines, would lived up to its potential more successfully.
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