By
Fred Blosser
Paul
Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice†drew almost uniformly positive A-list reviews
on its limited theatrical release in December 2014 (to qualify for 2014 Academy
Award nominations), and on its official nationwide release the following
month. Not a surprise: Anderson has been
a darling of critics since “Boogie Nights†(1997), and his script was based on
a 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, an academically revered novelist. Box-office wasn’t so hot, though. The gross from the nationwide opening weekend
was $381,000, and the total gross by the end of April only $11.1 million, just
a little more than half the film’s reported budget. Observers theorized that the film was sunk
by Pynchon’s perplexing, labyrinthine
storyline about a pothead private eye in a Cinema Retro setting of 1970 Los
Angeles. Well, maybe, but “Chinatownâ€
(1974) was a commercial success with an equally twisty script, and Ross
Macdonald, the dean of complex PI mysteries, sold well enough that he regularly
made the New York Times bestseller list at the end of his career.
In
fact, Ross Macdonald and “Chinatown†are two strands of the movie’s DNA, along
with Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep†(1939) and “The Long Goodbye†(1954),
the classic movies by Howard Hawks (1946) and Robert Altman (1973) that were
based on the two novels, Roger Simon’s counterculture PI Moses Wine in “The Big
Fix†(1973), turned into a 1978 film with Richard Dreyfuss, and arguably, the
Coen Brothers’ “The Big Lebowski†(1998). Mystery fans may enjoy teasing out the influences. Mainstream viewers may feel like they’ve
already been there, done that.
The
private eye at the center of Pynchon’s story, Larry “Doc†Sportello (Joaquin
Phoenix), is visited at his beach shack by a former girlfriend, Shasta Fay
Hepworth (Katherine Waterston). Shasta
Fay’s sugar daddy, Mickey Wolfmann, a real estate mogul, has disappeared. Shasta Fay believes that he may have been put
away against his will by his wife Sloane and Sloane’s boyfriend. She asks Doc to investigate. Doing so, the amiable, ambling PI encounters
a series of high-rolling and low-life characters who seem to have little or
nothing in common with each other. With
a little digging, Doc begins to uncover one tenuous thread that seems to
connect most of them, an association with something called “The Golden Fang.†The name may refer to a schooner used to ship
dope from Southeast Asia, a criminal ring that uses the vessel, a fraternity of
dentists, or a secluded sanitarium where Doc has a fleeting encounter with a
spaced-out Mickey, or all of the above. With each character, the name carries a different connotation. When a cute Asian girl in a massage parlor
reveals an important clue to Doc in a foggy alley, veteran mystery fans may
wonder if Pynchon and Anderson are also channeling the venerable pulp trappings
of Sax Rohmer and Fu Manchu.
Perhaps
today’s moviegoers don’t read Chandler or Macdonald, or maybe attention spans
have gotten shorter over the years. Like
their predecessors, Pynchon and Anderson use a variety of tricks to keep
viewers off-balance, principally the relentless introduction of new characters
as suspects and red herrings, to the point that in one brief scene, Doc perplexedly writes all the
names on a wall board and draws lines from one to the other to keep them
straight. However, the ultimate
unraveling of the mystery, when it arrives, seems pretty clear. For a real headscratcher, try Ross
Macdonald’s “The Blue Hammer†(1976) some time.
The
film’s actual shortcomings lie more with Anderson than Pynchon, including
inconsistent tone, uneven casting, and a decision to use a tired dramatic
device as the way to relate the story -- voiceover narration by one of Doc’s
other pals, trippy astrologer Sortilege (Joanna Newsom). Some critics defended Anderson’s choice as
the only way that the filmmaker could feasibly spoon out chunks of information
that Pynchon conveyed in his novel through the running narrative. But it seems like an easy and lazy out of a
challenge that might have been surmounted in a more dramatically satisfying way
with a little more thought. At that, it
still leaves unexplained some prominent details that were clear in the novel
but hazy in the film. For example, who
is “Aunt Reet,†the eccentric elderly woman from whom Doc mines some basic
intel about Mickey Wolfmann? Played by
an unrecognizable Jeannie Berlin, the character actually is Doc’s aunt, as the
novel explains, but she’s a puzzling cypher in the movie as she comes and goes
in one brief scene. Neither are Doc’s
working quarters in a medical building explained. Is he actually a physician? You have to read the novel to find out why he
operates out of a medical office. I
suspect that these puzzling, unexplained details were actually the main source
of frustration for paying audiences, and not the mystery plot itself.
Joaquin
Phoenix is excellent as Doc, and Josh Brolin is amusing as his requisite cop
nemesis, his performance hovering somewhere between the menacing persona of his
character in “Gangster Squad†(2013) and his straight-faced send-up in “Men in
Black III†(2013). In a bit perhaps
inspired by “L.A. Confidential†(1997), Brolin’s character exploits the LAPD’s
ties with Hollywood to land small roles in Jack Webb’s “Adam-12.†On TV, Doc watches a scene from the old show
in which Brolin is digitally inserted in the background behind Martin
Milner. The film’s best stunt-casting
places Reese Witherspoon as Doc’s occasional playmate, Deputy D.A. Penny
Kimball, and the two have the single best exchange of lines in the film:
Doc: “I need something from you. I need to look at
somebody’s jacket.â€
Penny:
“That’s it? That’s no big deal. We do it all the time.â€
Doc:
“What? You break into officially sealed
records all the time?â€
Penny
(casting a jaundiced glance): “Grow up.â€
The
Warner Home Video Blu-ray presents the movie in high-def, richly saturated
color. The special features include
three trailer-style clip compilations, each focused on a specific element of
the movie (paranoia, Shasta Fay, and the Golden Fang). An alternate, unused ending is included in
the fourth feature, “Everything in This Dream.†It hews a little closer to the final chapter
of Pynchon’s novel than the rather pedestrian finale that Anderson decided to
use instead, in which Doc and Shasta Fay sorta get back together. Nevertheless, although closer, it’s still not
up to Pynchon’s lyric, evocative conclusion. The package also contains a DVD version and a digital copy.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON