If you ever read any Thomas Pynchon back in his heyday ("V," "The Crying Of Lot
49," "Gravity's Rainbow"), you know that he has a...uh...somewhat tenuous
relationship with that thing that most people call reality.
So what would happen, one is tempted to wonder, if such a writer decided to
write an L.A. detective novel? The result might be, as the back-cover blurb for
"Inherent Vice" specified, "part-noir, part-psychedelic romp, all Thomas
Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze
to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with
the L.A. fog."
And what would happen if a filmmaker with a similarly tenuous relationship with
reality (Paul Thomas Anderson) decided to make a movie of it, starring weirdass
actors like Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Eric Roberts, Maya Rudolph, Benicio
Del Toro, Jena Malone, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, and a host of
lesser-known actors and actresses who all look remarkably at home walking
around in a drug-induced early-70s narco-fog?
It would be like a private detective trying to solve a mystery in a universe in
which by definition mysteries cannot ever be solved. Or something like that.
Director-screenwriter PTA manages to parse Pynchon's long-winded language well
enough to fit some good examples of it into the screenplay, so occasionally
there is a voiceover one-liner that just grabs you by the gnarlies and shakes
you and makes you say, "Wow, that's good writing!" But as to whether the whole
film makes you say, "Wow, that's good filmmaking," the jury is still out for
me...and I just watched it.
The movie "flows," in the same sense that being stoned in L.A. in the early 70s
"flowed," meaning that it was groovy without making any sense. Back in the
actual 70s, that would have been enough. In 2015, I'm not convinced it is. All
I can say right now is that I wasn't stoned while watching this but am a bit
after watching it. I'm not sure whether feeling that way is a good enough
reason to recommend this movie or not.
But the one thing I do know is that it sure is a delight to hear Tom Pynchon
taking on Chandleresque 70s-stoned L.A.-speak:
* "She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to.
Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always
sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish
t-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he
remembered, looking just like she swore she'd never look."
* "What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same
place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one
groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song."
* "He's technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi."
* "Hair and drug-use issues notwithstanding, I've never thought of you as any
less than professional."
* "As a courtesy I’m taking you out to the impound garage to get your vehicle.
We’ve been over it with the best tools available to forensic science, and
except for enough cannabis debris to keep an average family of four stoned for
a year, you’re clean. No blood or impact evidence we can use. Congratulations."
* "Though he may have rescued Japonica from a life of dark and unspecified
hippie horror, apparently restoration to the bosom of her family had been
enough to really drive her around the bend."
* "What was 'walking on water,' if it wasn’t Bible talk for surfing?"
* "You can only cruise the boulevards of regret for so long, and then you've
got to get up on the freeways again."
* "Back when, she could go weeks without anything more complicated than a pout.
Now she was laying some heavy combination of face ingredients on him that he
couldn't read at all."
* "They told me that I was precious cargo that couldn't be insured because of
Inherent Vice."
"What's that?"
"I don't know"
[Narrator] "Inherent Vice, in a marine insurance policy, is anything that
you can't avoid. Eggs break, chocolate melts, glass shatters. And Doc wondered
what that meant when applied to ex old ladies."
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi4155813401/
