#WhatThomWatched Glance*:
Inherent Vice
(2014, Paul Thomas Anderson; In theaters/Disc release announced for March 2015, Warner Bros.)
Inherent Vice is Paul Thomas Anderson’s seventh full length film, based on Thomas Pynchon’s seventh novel (published in 2009). But no Pynchon novel has ever been adapted for film; his early-career 1960’s and early 1970’s trifecta (V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow) are absolute classics of counterculture literature, but they and his later works were resistant to adaptation. PTA has pulled it off, creating a film parallel of Pynchon’s shambolic prose and outrageously-named side characters (though several of these have apparently been lost in the transition). The redoubtable Joaquin Phoenix plays “Doc” Sportello, a P.I. in a California beach town in 1970, who in time-honored film noir fashion is brought a confusing missing person case which twists bewilderingly through endless leads and complications until by the end it’s well-nigh impossible to tell if the bad guys were caught or if they weren’t the good guys all along. People who are complaining that they don’t understand the plot have clearly never watched noir; in the ur-noir The Big Sleep, with Bogie and Bacall, original writer Raymond Chandler famously told the screenwriters that he didn’t actually understand what was happening in the novel he himself had written. The best films noir similarly have a feeling of having gone off the rails as soon as the detective is on the case, with each followed lead pointing to yet another character with another murky motivation. (Also, in true noir, the lead must have the crap kicked out of him at least once and preferably over and over again.)
There have been other neo-modern, California-based, humorous, “sunny” films noir, and lots of critics bring them up as points of comparison, with Altman’s The Long Goodbye and the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski being the most obvious; these are fantastic movies in their own rights, but Inherent Vice is something very different. Long Goodbye’s primary hook is the 1940’s-detective-taken-out-of-his-time angle, Philip Marlowe going to sleep as Bogart and waking up in hippie-dippie L.A. and in Elliott Gould’s schlumpy body. Lebowski is the Coen’s reworking of the Bogart film’s beats into a 1990’s context, where Jeff Bridges’ reluctant Everydude is dragged through each noir step against his will. In Vice, Phoenix is a good detective; people around him are offbeat oddballs, but there’s nothing sloppy about the way he conducts his investigation. The missing person case is somehow connected to his great past love, played by Katherine Waterston; plenty of other friends and acquaintances are willing to assist him and despite the straight world’s distaste for his shaggy ways, he is able to gain access to the contacts and crime scenes he needs. The key to Vice is Phoenix’s relationship with his terminally grumpy frenemy counterpart in the straight world, Josh Brolin’s Lieutenant Detective Christian F. Bjornsen, or "Bigfoot." Brolin is at odds with Phoenix and everything he stands for, and yet they can meet halfway in their collaboration to find answers — and, in fact, by the end Brolin has gone farther than Phoenix has in his attempt to understand the other’s viewpoint. 
Reminds me of:
Like Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy (from the book by Sterne), Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Thompson), or Kubrick’s Lolita (Nabokov), this was another one of those “unfilmable author/unfilmable novel” projects for which the filmmaker has been given enough support (and taken a sufficiently large step back from the source material) to create a workable film version. In each case, the adapters have had to come up with new filmic structures and elements which somehow capture unique aspects of the written work. I’m not attempting in this short essay to tease out all the ways that Anderson (brilliantly, in my opinion) accomplishes this, because I’m going to need to own the film and watch it a bunch more times for that. But the most obvious modification (and the one remarked upon by every reviewer — I’m not claiming any insight here) is the selection of Doc’s old friend Sortilège as the voiceover narrator and the casting of singer/songwriter Joanna Newsom to play her. She’s not supposed to be a reliable narrator at all, but she serves at least two irremovable functions: she acts as a welcoming, pleasing connection into Phoenix’s world, giving us some empathy and understanding for his character without having to directly introduce Doc’s own voice, and of course she allows Anderson to bring in a huge dollop of Pynchon’s writing. Voiceover narration in a film is almost always a bad idea — but in adaptations of work where the author has a very distinct voice, and where that voice acts as a character of its own in the narrative, narration can be the vital connection between the film and the page. (This doesn’t matter if the written work is plot-driven or if the characters themselves speak to each other in distinct voices. But imagine Clockwork Orange without the pages and pages of Burgess text that Kubrick allows Malcolm McDowell to read in voiceover.) Perhaps the similarity between all of these positive examples is that unreliable narrator — narration as a character, where we’re asked to evaluate its motivations and truthfulness just as we study actions onscreen and suss out what they say about internal states. Some books are clearly going to lend themselves to that treatment, and here Anderson’s smart idea to is not let Phoenix have a Doc Sportello V.O. — forcing us to interpret his actions and reactions — while allowing Newsom’s soothing voice to keep us engaged.
But then — the guilt!
I am a massive, colossal, irredeemable, unapologetic, unmitigated fanatic for PTA. He and the other Anderson are my favorite working guilty-pleasure filmmakers. Until they start blowing it — i.e., until never, per their track record so far — I am going to be in the cinema seat for the premiere week of their new movies, and I am not going to be sitting there in critical or questioning or snarky mode — I am going to be sitting there in a receptive state, waiting to see what they have brought to show me, expecting to be told something new, and if I’m not instantly gratified by some easy, crowd-pleasing fluff, I’m going to be working harder to understand what they say, not going away feeling like they failed. This is my unashamed statement of fact. Thank the heavens above that I am not a "critic" and that these aren’t “reviews.”
I’ve mentioned a number of films based on book above — Lolita, Tristram Shandy, Clockwork Orange and so on — but whereas I’ve actually read all those books, the truth is I’ve never read a word of Pynchon, not Inherent Vice nor any other. I’ve always intended to read them, especially The Crying of Lot 49, which is one of those sort of books that was so spiritually akin to all the books/music/films I did read/hear/watch that I find myself in that weird pop-culture position of being able to grok references to things like Silent Tristero’s Empire (W.A.S.T.E.) or the Yoyodyne Corporation despite never having actually read the source.
Pitch:
At the risk of seeming purely prurient, the lengthy single-take scene which moves from a key Phoenix/Watterson conversation into and through their . . . spirited lovemaking is an acting miracle. Maybe I’ll have a different feeling after I’ve seen the movie a few more times, but in the theater I was holding my breath.
*For movies and shows which are current — in theaters or streaming — I'm posting a short, less-spoilery take on #WhatThomWatched (and generally only when something really strikes me as worth passing on). These shorter essays are labeled Glance.
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