Inherent Vice
Paul Thomas Anderson (2014)
I looked forward to Inherent Vice for several reasons. The trailer was the most enjoyable I’d seen for ages. The film is written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The cast includes plenty of talented actors. Inherent Vice has also quickly gained an aura of incomprehensibility: it was nice to think, as someone who often fails to understand a plot that hasn’t been remarked upon as Byzantine, I might be in good company this time. The experience of the whole movie hasn’t caused me to think any of these were bad reasons for being on its side and I still am. The trailer had an undoubted highlight: when someone hits ‘Doc’ Sportello – the stoner private eye who is the film’s protagonist – on the back of the head with a baseball bat, Joaquin Phoenix does a beautifully funny, split-second double-take before falling to the ground; but I think the convoluted plotting of Inherent Vice is the main reason why the trailer as a whole is so unusually good. Many trailers verge on summarising the story of the whole film. That would be impossible in this case. Instead, the two minutes set the basic scene, adumbrate the narrative complexity and give a flavour of the wit of the performers and the dialogue. Watching Inherent Vice in its entirety is a bit like watching a two-and-a-half-hour trailer. This is a shaggy dog story in which individual moments, or even episodes, make sense but their relation to each other is a different matter. I enjoyed the film a lot – 149 minutes in Paul Thomas Anderson’s company pass more quickly than five in Christopher Nolan’s. It does, though, raise the question of how meaningful enjoyment of a film can be if you’ve only a hazy idea of what’s been going on. The title, by the way, is explained – by the voiceover narrator of the film – as a term that occurs in the small print of marine insurance policies. (There is a ship involved in the story.) It means something that will unavoidably break down – ‘eggs break, chocolate melts’.
The time is 1970. The place is (the fictional) Gordita Beach in Los Angeles, where Doc Sportello inhabits an infirm-looking beach house. One evening, his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth pays Doc an unexpected call. Her new lover, Mickey Wolfmann, is a wealthy real-estate developer in the town. Shasta Fay asks Doc to help thwart a plot by Wolfmann’s wife and her lover to have Mickey abducted and committed to an insane asylum. The plot thickens very quickly and there’s no point my attempting a synopsis: I couldn’t without stealing someone else’s. Inherent Vice is based on the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon and the first attempt to adapt this author’s work for the screen. I’ve not read any Pynchon but he is, according to Wikipedia, ‘noted for his dense and complex novels’ so Anderson may well have been faithful to the spirit of the original. The interesting, enthusiastic review of the film in this week’s TLS strongly suggests that, if one is as well informed about the Pynchon oeuvre as the reviewer Paul Grimstad, Anderson’s adaptation of the novel may be richly rewarding. But someone steeped in Pynchon isn’t the best judge of the success of the movie of Inherent Vice: whatever one’s views about the relationship between a film and the material from another medium on which it’s based, what’s on screen needs to be self-sufficient to the extent that it’s intelligible without reference to the original.
The reception of Inherent Vice has included predictable comparisons with The Big Sleep and reiteration of the story of Raymond Chandler’s don’t-ask-me reply to Howard Hawks’s appeal for clarification as to who killed the chauffeur. (The locale and tone of Anderson’s film have also reasonably been compared with that of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye.) The critical response, to judge from Ryan Gilbey’s piece in the Guardian and a Rotten Tomatoes skim-read, has also featured a lot of stuff about Inherent Vice being a film you need to see more than once. There’s a growing school of thought, of course, that, now that movies are increasingly watched on DVD or online rather than in cinemas, the experience becomes closer to reading: you can replay sections as you might reread pages of a book. I suspect this is beside the point as far as this film is concerned, though. When I saw The Master (2012), I wrote that:
‘Paul Thomas Anderson is an uncompromising writer and director. He’s determined to take as long as he wants to tell a story which evidently fascinates him; he shows no signs of worry that audiences might get bored or not feel the same way.’
This approach is even more evident in Inherent Vice, in which Anderson is indifferent to the viewer’s frustration at not understanding what’s happening as well as at how long it’s taking to happen. A snatch of conversation between Doc and a character called Coy Harlingen – as they watch something happening a little way away – seems to sum it up.
Doc: I’m not sure I saw what that was.
Coy: Me neither – and I’m not sure I want to know …
(Coy, the saxophonist husband of a former heroin addict, is another missing person. Doc finds him hiding undercover at a house on Topanga Canyon. Coy thinks he can remain incognito even though he played saxophone with the band residing in the house where he’s hiding. A bit later, Doc sees a TV news item of Coy interrupting a speech being given by President Richard Nixon. Doc then discovers that Coy used to be a Communist but is now an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department. Etc.)
Plenty of movie fans scoff at the idea of thinking about a film. Cinema-going is all about immersing-yourself-in-the-big-screen-experience. Immediate gratification is all. Inherent Vice has the sort of video-game title that might draw an audience very different from readers of Thomas Pynchon novels. It’s quite funny to think of the likely reactions to Inherent Vice of filmgoers who just want and expect a good time (and of their reactions to the suggestion they should pay good money to see the film again). An artist like Paul Thomas Anderson should be free to do what he wants but he needs to be careful too. Anderson isn’t making small-budget pictures and, although There Will Be Blood made a handsome profit ($76m box office for a $25m budget), Punch-Drunk Love and The Master have barely broken even, years on from their release. Inherent Vice hasn’t yet recouped half its $20m budget.
There’s another change evident in Anderson’s recent work that makes me uncomfortable. The Master featured a startling (probably fantasy) sequence in which many women were naked while the two principal male characters were fully clothed. Enjoyment of Inherent Vice is interrupted by a sequence in which Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) returns to Doc’s beach house, again after a period of absence. Dan Callahan (evidently a fan of Boogie Nights and Magnolia and disappointed by this latest film) goes too far in The Wrap when he refers to the women in Inherent Vice as generally ‘just sexual creatures, either comic or creepy’. But it’s hard to disagree with Callahan’s description of the sequence that bothered me:
‘In an extended scene where [Shasta Fay] comes naked to Phoenix’s Doc and lays herself on his lap to be spanked for her transgressions, it is unclear just whose reality we are watching, and why. In a novel, you can control the tone of an ugly male fantasy like this, making it as real or unreal as you want. But when you have an actual naked actress in a long take, you can’t really control the reality of what viewers are seeing and hearing, and there seems to be little point to the scene except as something you write (or film) and then throw away before you embarrass yourself.’
That’s enough accentuating of the negative. Anderson, who was born in 1970, succeeds in realising the setting of Inherent Vice by his choice of songs for the soundtrack: these always feel right but are never obvious. Jonny Greenwood’s score, including apt echoes of (I think) the music for Spellbound and Vertigo, is effective too. So, to put it mildly, is Robert Elswit’s lighting. If you’re not sure what a group of actors is meant to be doing, how can you tell they’re doing it right? Impossible to explain yet you feel sure this is what happens here and the result is often elating. If this is a shaggy dog story, then Joaquin Phoenix is the shaggy dog. As a hippy PI (Doc Sportello’s sideburns have invaded much of his face), he’s perfect both as the viewer’s uncomprehending proxy and as the sleuth who (sometimes) can see things invisible to a layman. Phoenix uses his eyes – often way back in his head and cloudy, occasionally animated and piercing – to reflect this, very amusingly. Owen Wilson’s Coy Harlingen is effortlessly subversive. As Penny Kimball, the deputy DA with whom Doc’s having a sort-of affair, Reese Witherspoon is more exciting in her few minutes on screen than she was in the whole two hours of Wild: she distinguishes Penny’s professional and private personas very wittily. Josh Brolin delivers a daring, triumphantly funny and alarming turn as Detective Christian F ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornsen of the LAPD. The disturbing and increasingly disturbed Bigfoot – who’s both Doc’s nemesis and a weirdly kindred spirit – is a man of large and various appetites. We see him eating chocolate-coated bananas, barking an order for pancakes in a Japanese eatery (‘not as good as my mother’s pancakes but I come here for the respect’) and eventually consuming Doc’s marijuana supplies. Perhaps best of all is a phone call that Bigfoot makes from home, during which his young son refills his whisky glass before his firm disciplinarian dad tells the boy it’s time for bed.
As examples of other women in the cast who rise, with Reese Witherspoon, above Dan Callahan’s definition, I’d offer Jeannie Berlin (Doc’s Aunt Reet), Anderson’s wife Maya Rudolph (Petunia Leeway, a receptionist) and Hong Chau (Jade, an employee in a massage parlour). I’d not seen Hong Chau before: on this showing, she’s a very skilled comedienne. I found it hard to distinguish both the faces and the dreary voices (from the award-winning Patricia Arquette school of low-key whinge) of Katherine Waterston and Joanna Newsom (as the narrator, Sortilège) but there’s so much to like in the playing that it seems churlish to complain. In terms of orchestrating the work of a large, high-powered cast, Anderson comes closer here to Magnolia, his best film to date, than in anything he’s done in between. It will be obvious that part of the fun of Inherent Vice is in the characters’ names so it’s only fair to mention these as well as the actors’. They include: Benicio Del Toro (Sauncho Smilax, Esq), Michael K Williams (Tariq Khalil), Martin Short (Dr Rudy Blatnoyd), Sasha Pieterse (Japonica Fenway), Martin Donovan (Japonica’s father, Crocker), Eric Roberts (Wolfmann), Serena Scott Thomas (Mrs Wolfmann – and more entertaining than her big sister, Dame Kristin), Keith Jardine (Puck Beaverton) and Peter McRobbie (Adrian Prussia).
4 February 2015