Inherent vice viooz2/28/2024 There are a lot of good analyses already, and I’m partial to the overarching opinion so far that this movie, like so many others by Anderson, depicts the end of an era: Here the shift is from ’60s counterculture to ’70s popular culture, in others the end of the porn auteur, the death of his father (see Marc Maron’s recent WTF podcast for more details), and the turn of the century. When a client who's supposed to be in hiding shows up protesting a Nixon speech on television, is that a sign? An indication of a larger conspiracy at play? Who’s in charge here? Even for the viewer who hasn't lived through the ’70s and experienced Nixon in office, the era’s anxiety over the higher powers are expertly induced.Īnd it’s really, really tempting to spend the movie trying to make sense of it all. These motifs show up in the movie version like bad pennies, conjuring the sense of paranoia Doc’s feeling as he goes down the rabbit hole of finding Shasta surrounded in a haze of smoke. The movie’s at its best when it’s visually riffing on the sudden appearances of dissonant characters and things in Pynchon’s prose. This is-unfortunately for the success of the movie as a mystery but really great for its value as comedy-a very faithful adaptation. (Pynchon’s Inherent Vice made reference to an encyclopedia of California ’70s miscellany including: chocolate-covered bananas, pooka-shell necklaces, liquid eyeliner, shag-carpeted walls, whorehouse menus, and ’fros.) Pynchon's novels contain dozens of characters, wordy, indirect language, loose ends, and perhaps most obviously difficult for studios with a deadline, incredible attention to detail. It's taken 50 years for a work by Thomas Pynchon to come to the big screen because his narratives are impossible to follow, by design perhaps. The new characters and odd coincidences point him to a larger conspiracy involving a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which could alternately be a luxury schooner, an Indo-Chinese drug ring, or a syndicate of dentists. A heroin-addict-turned-drug-counselor's request that he determine if her late husband is actually dead turns up intelligence interest at the federal level, and an old acquaintance of Wolfmann's, Jade (Hong Chau, supremely funny). A Black Panther asks Doc to locate Wolfmann's bodyguard (who happens to be involved in the Aryan Brotherhood). If the investigation sounds like an odyssey, it comes together by coincidence. Before long, Fay’s disappeared, Doc’s set up for the murder of the tycoon’s bodyguard, and he starts looking into Wolfmann, aimlessly because he’s stoned. She's now dating a real estate mogul named Michael Wolfmann, but there's trouble in paradise: Wolfmann’s wife and her boyfriend want Fay’s help in committing Wolfmann to a mental institution to make off with his money. There’s a quest, of sorts, resembling the concept of a '40s noir: In 1970, private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is visited by his tall, tanned California ex-flame Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston, a femme fatale in an orange high-necked minidress). Considering all this, the stakes were always going to be too high for this film.īut at its most basic level, Inherent Vice, in book and film forms, isn't asking for probing inquiry: It's about a pothead bumbling around L.A. It’s directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the rare Hollywood creative who can produce enigmatic films of epic lengths within the studio system, the last of which, The Master, showed his unaccommodating art at its peak. The movie’s based on the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, the notoriously camera-shy author considered a paradigmatic postmodernist. This is the blessing and the curse facing Inherent Vice, the rare stoner comedy that will receive more critical attention than it should. When a celebrated director helms the first-ever adaptation of a book by a notoriously cerebral author, the natural impulse is to overanalyze.
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