Inherent Vice (15.)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Katherine Waterstone, Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Benecio Del Toro. 149 mins
Thomas Pynchon sentences, like Thomas Pynchon paragraphs and Thomas Pynchon novels, have a way of getting away from you. They start in one place and flip wildly through time and location, between metaphor and literal, reality and dream, and end up somewhere entirely different. They entice you in with the offer of convention defying freedom and head spinning wonder, but then turn out to be a bit of a chore to get through.
After a half century at the summit of American literature he at last gets the honour of a film treatment, with PT Anderson, Hollywood's ranking auteur, taking a crack at one of his more accessible works, hippy noir Inherent Vice. Joint fiend P.I. “Doc” Sportello (Phoenix) is basically The Big Lebowski's Dude turned pro. The reappearance of an ex-girlfriend (Waterstone) sees him getting mixed up in a labyrinthine plot involving two missing people who aren't missing, a dead man who isn't dead, and a boat that may share a name with a vast drugs dealing cartel. Doc's constant intoxication means that he has only a hazy and incomplete grasp of the machinations going on around him. Having read the book, (prelude to another failed crack at Gravity Rainbow,) I had a similarly loose hold on events: technically I knew who these people were and what was happening, while simultaneously having no real idea what was going on.
Pynchon is often described as a comic writer but I think this is because he is relativley lighthearted by doorstopper standards rather than him actually being funny. Inherent Vice's pot head digressions and capers in an LA still reeling from the Manson murders are meant to embody the betrayal of the counter culture dream and the beginning of the return to straightdom. If anyone could do Pynchon you'd think it might be Anderson but this largely defeats him and doesn't even have the usual compensations of his films. It looks kind of scuzzy, and though there are individual moments and performances that work well, it doesn't join up. Of course at some level it's not supposed to, Pynchon always likes to leave matter in a dreamlike haze but it's a tricky thing to translate to the screen – a shaggy dog story that is trying to carry great symbolic weight.
Anderson was fairly ruthless when he adapted Upton Sinclair's Oil! into There Will Be Blood, taking only what he needed from it and discarding the rest. Inherent Vice is the worst kind of book translation. He has filmed filmed two and half hours of his favourite scenes from the book and stuck them together in the same order. Worse yet he has chosen a random subsidiary character to be its narrator so he can get her to read out stretches of Pynchon prose. Narrators are often a cop out and here it's really feels like an admission of failure: a condensed talking book with pictures.
There Will be Blood week of release review
The Master week of release review
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Katherine Waterstone, Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Benecio Del Toro. 149 mins
Thomas Pynchon sentences, like Thomas Pynchon paragraphs and Thomas Pynchon novels, have a way of getting away from you. They start in one place and flip wildly through time and location, between metaphor and literal, reality and dream, and end up somewhere entirely different. They entice you in with the offer of convention defying freedom and head spinning wonder, but then turn out to be a bit of a chore to get through.
After a half century at the summit of American literature he at last gets the honour of a film treatment, with PT Anderson, Hollywood's ranking auteur, taking a crack at one of his more accessible works, hippy noir Inherent Vice. Joint fiend P.I. “Doc” Sportello (Phoenix) is basically The Big Lebowski's Dude turned pro. The reappearance of an ex-girlfriend (Waterstone) sees him getting mixed up in a labyrinthine plot involving two missing people who aren't missing, a dead man who isn't dead, and a boat that may share a name with a vast drugs dealing cartel. Doc's constant intoxication means that he has only a hazy and incomplete grasp of the machinations going on around him. Having read the book, (prelude to another failed crack at Gravity Rainbow,) I had a similarly loose hold on events: technically I knew who these people were and what was happening, while simultaneously having no real idea what was going on.
Pynchon is often described as a comic writer but I think this is because he is relativley lighthearted by doorstopper standards rather than him actually being funny. Inherent Vice's pot head digressions and capers in an LA still reeling from the Manson murders are meant to embody the betrayal of the counter culture dream and the beginning of the return to straightdom. If anyone could do Pynchon you'd think it might be Anderson but this largely defeats him and doesn't even have the usual compensations of his films. It looks kind of scuzzy, and though there are individual moments and performances that work well, it doesn't join up. Of course at some level it's not supposed to, Pynchon always likes to leave matter in a dreamlike haze but it's a tricky thing to translate to the screen – a shaggy dog story that is trying to carry great symbolic weight.
Anderson was fairly ruthless when he adapted Upton Sinclair's Oil! into There Will Be Blood, taking only what he needed from it and discarding the rest. Inherent Vice is the worst kind of book translation. He has filmed filmed two and half hours of his favourite scenes from the book and stuck them together in the same order. Worse yet he has chosen a random subsidiary character to be its narrator so he can get her to read out stretches of Pynchon prose. Narrators are often a cop out and here it's really feels like an admission of failure: a condensed talking book with pictures.
There Will be Blood week of release review
The Master week of release review
