INHERENT
VICE B-
USA (148
mi) 2014 d: Paul Thomas
Anderson Official
site
He is everything. He must be a complete man
and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather
weathered phrase, a man of honor…He is a relatively poor man, or he would not
be a detective at all. He is a common man, or he could not go among
common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his
job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence
without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his
pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw
him. . . . The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would
be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.
—Raymond Chandler essay, The Simple Art of Murder, 1944
Stoner silliness? Is that enough for most movie
audiences today? David Gordon Green made a slip into these kinds of
lame, air-headed pot movies with mixed results, as he discovered an entirely
new mainstream audience that was willing to pay for the laughs while alienating
his hard corps art film admirers who had been with him since the
beginning. Green, who created the prototype of American indie films
with George
Washington (2000) and ALL THE REAL GIRLS (2003) has returned to his
roots of late, but not until after making a cash killing in Hollywood with the
commercially successful PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008). Enter Paul Thomas
Anderson, a heralded American director of some repute who has dazzled audiences
with the likes of Magnolia (1999)
and There
Will Be Blood (2007), but has also disappointed many of his own
followers with the rambling vacuousness of The Master (2012),
a film that plunges over the edge into nothing of real significance, where
there’s barely a hint of human drama holding our attention, yet it’s filmed in
an epic style. INHERENT VICE is a $20 – 30 million dollar picture
(including an expensive awards campaign) that has barely generated $8 million
dollars at the box office and garnered only two Oscar nominations, for
writer/director Anderson in the Best Adapted Screenplay and also Best Costume
Design. All of Anderson’s pictures have moments of brilliance, where
even if they tend to alienate the audience, a criticism of all his recent
efforts, they are exceptionally well made and look positively terrific on the
screen. Adapted from the 2009 Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name,
Anderson probably deserves special recognition for turning this seemingly
impossible to film book into a motion picture, as nobody has turned a Pynchon
book into a movie before, where he started working on a script in December 2010
while still working on The Master,
developing several variations through a series of scripts, playing around with
the idea of the narrator. When the novel was released, one of the
shortest and quickest written over the course of his entire career, it was
advertised by the publisher as “part-noir, part-psychedelic romp, all Thomas
Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze
to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with
the L.A. fog.”
The free wheeling, drug-oriented style of the movie, which
features more onscreen pot smoking since the Cheech
& Chong movies of the 70’s and 80’s, but the zany irreverence
expressed throughout is closer to John Carpenter’s Big
Trouble in Little China (1986), where the wisecracking and always
quotable Kurt Russell is replaced by the counterculture world of residential
pothead Joaquin Phoenix, the constantly high, smart aleck private investigator
Larry “Doc” Sportello living in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County in
the 1970’s, where he seems defined by the expression, “What I lack in al-titude,
I make up for in at-titude.” Immersed in a world where
he’s the center of a 40’s style, hard-boiled detective story, it feels like
most of the film is taking place in the pot-induced fantasies of his head, where
the wish fulfillment aspect is everpresent, as Doc is constantly in demand, for
some reason, even by startlingly attractive ladies, though his inability to
take anything seriously and his perpetual disinterest in the lives of others
seems to define his warped aura of self-obsession and
delusion. Nonetheless, certainly part of the fun is just getting to
know the Southern California landscape, where just the list of the character’s
names feels like they could easily have been stolen from a Fu Manchu B-movie,
and indeed the Chinese underworld, as expressed by a vast and secretive
organization known as the Golden Fang, figures prominently here, where their
reach spreads everywhere, into every dark corner of the film. When
Doc attempts to warn someone that “This is the Golden Fang you’re about to rip
off here, man,” he’s startled by the dismissive nature of the reply, “That’s
according to your own delusional system.” What’s real and what
isn’t?—it hardly matters in this sprawling universe of pop culture references,
where Doc is a healthy mix of “The Dude” from the Coen brothers’ The
Big Lebowski (1998) and Elliot Gould’s reinvented “Marlowe” from
Raymond Chandler’s The
Long Goodbye (1973), Robert Altman’s subversive 70’s update of the
conventional 40’s film noir. Anderson’s drug-fueled detective story
features psychedelic music and the grainy cinematography of Robert Elswit, who
has shot every one of Anderson’s films, luring the audience into the near
wordless, atmospheric mood with the extraordinary opening mix of CAN - Vitamin C - YouTube (3:32)
and Can-Soup (Full
Song) - YouTube (9:21).
Both hilarious and at times confounding, the film takes
place in the fictional setting of Gordita Beach, a stand-in for Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon most
likely lived in the late 60’s and early 70’s, lying on the south end of
the Santa Monica Bay. In 1970, Nixon’s in
the White House, Ronald Reagan is Governor of California, while Charles Manson
and his Helter Skelter cult of stoned-out groupies are about to go on trial for
their hideous exhibition of mass murder. Whatever lingering hopes
might be left over from the peace and love generation of the 60’s have been
brutally repressed by a crush of demonstrations, the arrests, killings, and
near extinction of the Black Panther Party, a prolonged war overseas in
Vietnam, and the prevalence of a law and order police state in Los
Angeles. While the plot machinations are ridiculously circuitous, keeping
the audience wondering just who Doc is working for, as he continues to get
hired even while still working his previous cases, where the intertwining
activity is simply off the charts and too much to keep up with, taking a page
out of THE BIG SLEEP (1946), notorious for offering one of the most
incomprehensible plots, as Doc just gets deeper and deeper into some big
shit. It all begins with the arrival of an ex-girlfriend Shasta
(Katherine Waterston), Inherent Vice - 'Shasta Fay' [HD (1:07),
currently having an affair with a high profile real estate developer Mickey
Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), mostly seen on stupid-as-hell ads shown continuously
on TV. Word has it that Mickey’s British wife Sloane Wolfmann
(Serena Scott Thomas) is having an affair of her own with international
playboy-of-the-month Riggs Warbling (Andrew Simpson), where both have designs
of scamming Mickey out of his money by having him committed to a mental asylum. Meanwhile,
local Black Nationalist Tariq Kahl (Michael Kenneth Williams) wants to hire Doc
to recover money owed to him by one of Mickey’s white supremacist bodyguards,
Glen Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), in some unfinished business that goes
back when both were in prison together. When Mickey goes missing
(along with Shasta) and Charlock ends up dead, his body laying next to Doc who
wakes up after being knocked out cold, that makes him the principal suspect on
the case, where he has to explain himself to Lieutenant Detective Christian F.
“Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), described by the narrator as “SAG member,
John Wayne walk, flat top of Flintstone proportions and that evil, little
shit-twinkle in his eye that says Civil Rights Violations,” Doc’s right-wing,
conservative counterpart on the LAPD, Inherent Vice "what's
exactly the beef here" scene - YouTube (1:05), the man chiefly
responsible for some serious police harassment, bad vibes and a cloud of
paranoia hovering over Doc wherever he goes. And if this was not
enough, Doc is hired yet again by Hope Harlington (Jena Malone), a former
heroin addict who wants her husband back, Coy (Owen Wilson), a sax player who
feigned his death to avoid insurmountable debts, where a mysterious payment
received “after” his death leads her to believe he is still alive.
At two and a half hours, the screwball comedy of stoner noir
is an unending labyrinth of joint smoking, wrong turns, near misses, and
dumbfounding jokes and visual gags, but as long as the film is heading
somewhere, following the neverending myriad of clues, an open-minded audience
is willing to play along. Perhaps the most peculiar variation from
the novel is the use of a side character as the narrator, Sortilège (Joanna
Newsom), who barely figures in the story, but always seems to be around Doc’s
residence on the beach, like an alternate consciousness that makes sure he’s
all right. Not only does she appear to have an all-knowing and
omniscient eye, but a direct line to the author as well, as she continually
speaks his voice. While it sounds like a kind of updated hipster
slang from Raymond Chandler, it’s curious that Doc and Elliot Gould as Marlowe
both end up peeking into the private grounds of an upscale sanitarium in search
of their missing men. Both detectives make their best attempts to
solve the unraveling mystery, but even with insider help from the District
Attorney’s office from an old flame Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon), Inherent Vice I wanted to
see if you were free for dinner scene (47 seconds), it all remains
wrapped in a mystery, where there’s no nice and tidy conclusion, which makes it
a lengthy journey for little to no payoff. The entire film feels
like a lead-up to a signature event, always leading to this expected crescendo,
after which it’s mostly a let down. Shasta returns from out of the
fog and somehow rekindles whatever’s left of their distant love
affair. While it’s blown up into giant-sized close ups, the tone of
the entire film changes, as does the seriousness of the music, becoming overly
symphonic and dramatically downbeat, while up until then the music had been
nothing but playful and enjoyable. By the time it winds down,
however, there’s an overall impression that nothing throughout the entire film
has been learned or taken seriously, as if that is emblematic of the stoner
experience, where it’s not the destination but the journey that matters. (“What
a long, strange trip it’s been.”) For many that will be enough, kind
of an updated and reinvented version of Easy Rider (1969)
and Two-Lane
Blacktop (1971), counterculture films that took us to the end of the
road and left us there. Defining films for a morally divided
generation, both were significant as drifter road movies that expressed a
general aimlessness of the times, where the music was the message, and they
were powerful indictments of a fed-up dissatisfaction with the broken dreams of
60’s aspirations, the corruption of moral authority, and the co-opting of the
American Dream. INHERENT VICE is an adrenaline-laced, sarcastic
sneer at a mixed up society of diametrically opposed values that is on the
verge of losing its bearings and visibly crumbling to its feet, within a few
years of actually kicking out a President, turning into a long, wayward
adventure that meanders through the heart of recognizable cultural signposts
and ends in a listless waft of smoke, becoming a drifting love story that
doesn’t really matter at all, as the audience doesn’t care about the love angle
or any of the sketchy and mostly undeveloped characters, where a Paul Thomas
Anderson film once again makes a grand entrance with a fancy build-up before
fading into the nothingness of The Master,
where many may feel let down by the existential pointlessness of it all.
No comments:
Post a Comment