Inherent Vice (2014)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
In Los Angeles at the turn of the 1970s, drug-fueled detective Larry "Doc" Sportello investigates the disappearance of an ex-girlfriend.
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Not only does it continue Anderson’s impossible-to-predict genre shifting, but it feels like a particularly heightened variation on Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), which had the radical notion of planting Raymond Chandler’s hardened private dick Philip Marlowe smack in the middle of Southern California hippie culture and having Elliott Gould play him as a languid dolt (one of ’70s Hollywood’s most memorable deconstructions of heroism).
The slow disgust, the moral apathy, the hippie princesses and the louts who victimized them — it was all there first in "The Long Goodbye."
Joaquin Phoenix resists the urge to take the easy way out and plays Doc not as Shaggy from "Scooby-Doo" but as a sadder, scruffier Philip Marlowe from Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye," the movie Anderson uses as a touchstone.
It’s already a cliché to describe the film as a combination of the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” and Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” and while that doesn’t capture everything it’s close enough to be irresistible.
It’s true bones lie more in accordance with Robert Altman’s elegiac “The Long Goodbye” and Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”
Freely but faithfully adapted by Anderson from Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 detective novel — the first of the legendary author’s works to reach the screen — Anderson’s seventh feature film is a groovy, richly funny stoner romp that has less in common with “The Big Lebowski” than with the strain of fatalistic, ’70s-era California noirs (“Chinatown,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Night Moves”) in which the question of “whodunit?”
Like many of his contemporaries, Anderson mistakes movie references for ideas — this one recalls those 1970s sunshine noirs “Chinatown” and “The Long Goodbye.”
Tubeside"), to the meandering plot, recalling The Big Sleep , Chinatown , and -- yes -- Lebowski .
Joaquin Phoenix gives a relatively restrained (for him) performance as a substance-loving private eye who gets drawn into a convoluted conspiracy very vaguely reminiscent of “Chinatown’’ involving a real-estate magnate (Eric Roberts).
The land-development angle recalls Chinatown, of course, but the biggest single influence is Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which similarly told the story of a private eye in a ‘70s-era Los Angeles that had left him behind.
If The Master—a better movie, if only by virtue of being one of the best of this decade so far—riffed on some of the major themes of 1940s film noir (the returning veteran, charlatanism, sexual anxiety), Inherent Vice is closer to Chinatown.
Some of the mysteries intersect and resolve — akin to “Chinatown,” with land swapped for water — but most crest and recede rather than coalesce into a clearly delineated conspiracy.
In that way, Inherent Vice will undoubtedly remind younger moviegoers of The Big Lebowski, when in fact they’re both working from the same common set of references and echoes.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s combination energy – equally frantic and laid back, often at the exact same time – will evoke many pleasant memories of The Big Lebowski.
Adapted from Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel, the movie has been compared by many to the Coen brothers' " The Big Lebowski ," a drug-fueled LA comedy with a similarly labyrinthian mystery (or "mystery") and some shared themes.
It’s already a cliché to describe the film as a combination of the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” and Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” and while that doesn’t capture everything it’s close enough to be irresistible.
Even with the added help of an imaginary female sidekick and narrator (Joanna Newsom, slightly vocal-fried and off-period), Inherent Vice dares you to tame it or compare it to similarly shaggy predecessors—to Robert Altman's radical The Long Goodbye or the Coens' The Big Lebowski.
The Big Sleep, which many have referenced as a companion, is full of dry wit and so too are convoluted mysteries like Kiss, Kiss Bang Bang and The Big Lebowski, which are also more fun.
Anderson also admitted that he gave up trying to make sense, using Howard Hawks and Jules Furthman's famous Philip Marlowe movie "The Big Sleep" as his touchstone.
Later, when discussing the very elaborate and oft-discombobulating plot, Anderson referenced the film-noir classic The Big Sleep (1946) as an indecipherable influence.
Watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s wonderfully textured and intricate LA-set Inherent Vice, you are easily reminded of the famous story about Howard Hawks’ version of The Big Sleep (1946).
Drifting in the netherworld between The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski (with Altman’s The Long Goodbye providing significant spiritual guidance), Inherent Vice does an extraordinary job of translating Pynchon’s prose to the screen; for all its free-fall feel and apparently scattershot structure, Anderson’s Oscar-nominated screenplay (which lifts much of its dialogue directly from the book) and open-hearted direction effectively distil the author’s distinctive literary aesthetic, even when occasionally diverging from the source material.
The film, which takes place in 1970, follows stoner, sandal-clad private detective Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) as he becomes further and further enmeshed in a mystery that makes Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep — or Howard Hawks’ even more impenetrable 1946 film of that novel — look positively straightforward.
During the production of 1946's The Big Sleep , director Howard Hawks and his screenwriters found themselves with an unanswered question about the murder plot that drove the Bogart-Bacall film: Who'd killed the chauffeur?
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Anderson says his style of directing actors was inspired by the farces — Airplane!
(Anderson claims to have gotten the idea from the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedies Airplane!
Here, people perhaps expected something hard-boiled, and got Paul Thomas Anderson's take on Airplane!
The female schemer is Wolfmann’s English wife (Serena Scott Thomas), whom Doc interviews briefly in a poolside scene lifted from the pulp masterpiece Robert Aldrich made of Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly .
“Inherent Vice,” while not as satisfying as Anderson’s masterpiece “Magnolia,” is a strange, twisting (and sometimes-twisted) tale that reminded me of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” because it shares Hunter Thompson’s “gonzo” vibe.
As with Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, the filmmaker has created another vivid Los Angeles, one that doesn't lean too hard on its pop-culture references to TV's Adam-12 or Neil Young's gentle Harvest album.
This is the first time revered and reclusive American author Thomas Pynchon has been adapted for the big screen; you could say he’s found his perfect match in the man behind Magnolia and There Will Be Blood .
As with previous Anderson films, which include “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia,” the movie contains colorful and questing characters looking for familial or spiritual connection in Los Angeles and thereabouts.
As a director, Anderson painted on the large canvas before he had the material to fill it: Boogie Nights and Magnolia now look drastically overambitious and it wasn’t until There Will Be Blood that he succeeded in matching form with content.
His heir apparent, Paul Thomas Anderson, however, has had success following a similar format of telling complex tales filled with lots of characters, such as occurred in "Magnolia," "Boogie Nights" and "The Master."
Maverick Robert Altman's was Brewster McCloud (a favorite of mine).
The humor, though, is closer to “Brewster McCloud”: zany, wacky, almost alienatingly eccentric.
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The other extreme takes the approach of a conspiracy theory enthusiast where a nod or a wink from the protagonist tugs on threads leading to a director’s intent on how the moon landing was faked (an actual theory held about Stanley Kubrick and The Shining showcased in the excellent documentary Room 237 ).
…and The Naked Gun were laugh-a-minute, whereas Inherent Vice is more baffled-guffaw-every-now-and-then.