Stumbling out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s deliriously woozy adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 stoner mystery novel, I wondered whether this is what it would feel like to smoke celluloid – to take a hit from a huge bong into which had been stuffed several thousand feet of heat-damaged film, along with umpteen yellowed pages of a Raymond Chandler paperback and the melted vinyl of several Neil Young albums.
You certainly get the sense that this is a movie Anderson wants to you inhale rather than watch; to succumb to its strange paranoid rhythms, to float over its garbled incomprehensible plot and to laugh hysterically at its blitzed-and-fried slapstick humour.
From the film-maker’s point of view, it’s a precarious balancing act, between visceral, tactile nostalgia and sprawling self-indulgence. When it works, Inherent Vice has the quality of a half-remembered dream, wafting us into a profoundly cinematic altered state. 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.
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. 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”. 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.
It is within this atmosphere of fear and loathing that dopey PI Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, smelling of “patchouli fart”) embarks upon an absurdist odyssey involving missing persons, Chinatown land deals, (un)dead musicians, international drug smugglers, neo-Nazis, druggy dentists, poisonous politics, freaked-out cops, rampant corruption and random cunnilingus.
Teased into action by disappearing ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), Doc is regularly kicked up the butt by LAPD stooge Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a flat-topped flat-foot with a too-tight suit and an urgent need for “moto panacaku!” whose buttoned-down demeanour provides a comic foil for Doc’s “hippy scum” baggy shamble. One follows rules and regulations, the other relies on ouija boards and phone calls from beyond; both are utterly out of their depths.
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.
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. 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. 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. Or, in the words of Peter Fonda’s Captain America: “We blew it.”
It’s significant that the film’s only other Oscar nod is for costume design. 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. The wardrobe sessions must have been a hoot.
Whether the same was true of the shoot remains a moot point. 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. 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. This can prove patience-testing, particularly when stretched over two-and-a-half hyperventilating hours. 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.
As 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.
