The mood has the loose, easy feel of 1973’s The Long Goodbye, a hypnotic update on Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) from Anderson’s beloved mentor, Robert Altman. turf brimming with the surfers, New-Agers, Nazi bikers, acid heads, tax-dodging dentists and mysterious consortium called the Golden Fang. The plot, such as it is, kicks in when Shasta persuades Doc to find to find her new love, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), a real-estate tycoon whose wife wants him institutionalized. It’s Anderson’s first constricted film, the one that never completely breaks free.Īnd yet, the movie’s pleasures are undeniable. Inherent Vice plays like a collaboration, a sign of respect to a virtuoso. There Will Be Blood drew on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil, but barely and not so as you’d recognize it. In his six previous films ( Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master), Anderson let the stories flow from his own fervid imagination. Anderson is tipping his hat to Pynchon, which he will do frequently, but this PTA enthusiast yearns to see him show, not tell.
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But the words are straight from Pynchon, the very first paragraph of his book, and the movie stops to let us hear them. It’s lovely stuff, gorgeously rendered by Newsom. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look.” Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. “She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. It’s definitely in Anderson’s wheelhouse. Inherent Vice is a film noir laced with pot and shrooms and the sense of lost ideals. It’s set in Southern California in 1970 (Anderson’s birth year) just as the psychedelic Age of Aquarius with its peace-love-stoned sense of community is being replaced by the decade of Manson, Altamont, Nixon and Me Me Me. Inherent Vice is regarded as a playful throwaway. Anderson is not climbing the Pynchon mountain, the Old Testament of cyberpunk that is Gravity’s Rainbow. The filmmaker takes babysteps into the minefields erected by the hermit author, 77, who rivals J.D.
If forced to diagnose the problem, I’ll have to go with Anderson’s understandable, if excessive loyalty to Pynchon, a gnarly genius of a writer whose near-Joycean language defies translation into other forms. It’s the work of a major talent.Īnd yet, it’s a struggle. It may not demand repeat viewings, but it sure as hell rewards them. Inherent Vice is packed with shitfaced hilarity, soulful reveries, stylistic ingenuity and smashing performances that keep playing back in your head. It’s tough to pinpoint where the equilibrium goes flooey, mostly because Anderson - the best and most audaciously original filmmaker of his generation - can’t compose a dull shot or one that doesn’t pulsate with the infinite mathematical possibilities for fucking up that circulate within the human psyche. Something’s a little off in Paul Thomas Anderson’s cinematic excursion into the literary wilds of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.
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