![]() ![]() It occurs at the end of an era - after the Manson murders - when the sensibility of the '60s was fading away.Ĭommunes were being replaced by corporations and institutions. You should take brownies, instead of popcorn, to Inherent Vice.ĭirector/screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson blows smoke for 148 minutes - the film's essence is captured by an image of smoke curling in the air.Īdapted from the novel by Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice is set in Southern California in 1970. Anderson’s best (and most comically comparable) film, Punch-Drunk Love, significantly remains his shortest, its economical length brilliantly tempering the mania of Adam Sandler’s antihero who could so easily have become insufferable.Īs for Inherent Vice, I found myself going with it for about two thirds of the time, seduced by its sweetness, suspicious of its sexuality (there’s no Dirk Diggler appendage here to offset the liberal displays of female flesh), occasionally exasperated by its incessant shaggy-doggedness.Content by Tony Macklin. This can prove patience-testing, particularly when stretched over two-and-a-half hyperventilating hours. Yet there is method in Anderson’s madness a genuine desire not to simplify Pynchon’s famously unfilmable prose, but, rather, to transfer it to the screen in all its infuriating intangibility. Tales of random on-set improvisation have fuelled a mystique of ill-disciplined chaos, reminding us that the more fun a film is to make, the less fun it is to watch. Whether the same was true of the shoot remains a moot point. The wardrobe sessions must have been a hoot. ![]() Despite the star-spangled cast (everyone from Benicio del Toro to Maya Rudolph and even – allegedly – Pynchon himself gets a look in), the clothes are a supporting performance all on their own Doc dressed as Gold Rush/ Harvest-era Neil Young, Owen Wilson’s double agent Coy Harlingen channelling Zoot from The Muppets, Martin Short going full Austin Powers as Dr Rudy Blatnoyd. It’s significant that the film’s only other Oscar nod is for costume design. Owen Wilson and Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice. Or, in the words of Peter Fonda’s Captain America: “We blew it.” When the action descends into pratfalls and Zucker brothers’ zaniness (as it does with increasing regularity), the score binds us back to a more melancholic mood, reminding us that beyond all this madness something intangible has been lost. Jonny Greenwood’s score adds resonance and romance his orchestrations creeping round the edges of classic cuts by Neil Young and Can, wafting through the heady air of mutton-chopped befuddlement. Visually, this is a richly tactile experience, Robert Elswit’s gorgeous 35mm photography capturing the textures of LA’s beaches, pavements and apartments, evoking a lost world already nostalgic for its own past. This is the era of Nixonian vice and police brutality, of financial venality and corporate intrigue, all represented here by the spectre of the “Golden Fang” – a sprawling personification of “The Man” from whom these wide-eyed idealists have spectacularly failed to be free.ĭrifting 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. Like the portrayal of the 1980s in Boogie Nights, the 1970s of Inherent Vice is an aftermath Altamont has happened, Charles Manson is awaiting trial, the Kent State shootings are just around the corner and hippies are no longer “cute”. Set very specifically in early 1970, when the great wave of the 1960s had duly broken and rolled back, Inherent Vice is littered with California casualties who find themselves washed up on the dark shores of an unforgiving decade. But get out of step with it and suddenly you’re left with the headache of being the only sober person in a room full of furry freaks. When it works, Inherent Vice has the quality of a half-remembered dream, wafting us into a profoundly cinematic altered state. From the film-maker’s point of view, it’s a precarious balancing act, between visceral, tactile nostalgia and sprawling self-indulgence.
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