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.
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| Private detective Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, left) and maritime lawyer Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro) watch from an oceanside restaurant as a suspicious schooner — recently re-christened the Golden Fang — makes its way into port, its purpose certain to be illicit. |
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.
