Inherent Vice (2014)

There was a point in the midst of Inherent Vice, PaulThomas Anderson’s latest examination of recent American history, that I began to wonder if he’d made the film just for me. I loved every single second of it, but listening to various (considerably younger) fellow viewers’ comments as I left the screening, realised just how much baggage you need to carry to withstand the two and a half hours of screen time. Dripping with authenticism and almost hermetic in its depiction of a very particular moment in the USA’s road to post-‘60s cynicism, Inherent Vice demands that you know your stuff, counter-culture and politics-wise, not to mention musically.  

(I apologise wholeheartedly if that last paragraph sounded like some pompous way of saying I liked this film and therefore I know a lot of stuff and you will only like this film if you are clever like me. What I’m actually trying to say is that I liked this film so much that I want everyone to like it too, and I worry that it may be a little too niche for many peoples’ tastes.)

Thomas Pynchon’s typically character-rich, absurdist view of the West Coast in 1970 is both dreamily nostalgic (in a good way, says Anderson) for a lost era and the closest equivalent to Chandleresque as he ever got. The shaggy dog tale of Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, a dope smoking P.I. in requisite khaki combat jacket, shades and sandals, simultaneously chasing a missing construction magnate, an ex-husband, a drug cartel and a lost love.

The oddest thing about Anderson’s film is that, for the first time that I can remember, it bears comparison with and references other films. Of course any circular tale filled with great cameos, stoner logic and an impenetrable mystery is going to make anyone think of The Big Leibowski, and the plot tangles give the whole piece a doper-grandson-of-Chandler dynamic. At about the halfway mark, pretty much as in The Big Sleep, you give up on any kind of grasp on who has done what to who. Apart from the other Altman/Chinatown/Long Goodbye etc. etc. allusions there’s a whole Hunter S. Thompson Gonzo section featuring Martin Short as the superbly deranged dentist, Dr. Rudy Batnoyd. And if that weren’t enough, here’s Benicio Del Toro… as a lawyer! This attorney is, however, an endearing marine law specialist with a taste in deep fried steak. Come to think of it, just about everyone in this film is in some way endearing. Even the villains are acceptably erudite.

Somewhere in between good and bad is, naturally, the policeman nemesis to Doc’s P.I.: Detective Christian ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornsen, played by Josh Brolin (above), channeling his inner Tommy Lee Jones again. The love/hate hippie/pig relationship is superb, especially as half of their exchanges are by telephone, showing the hilarious juxtaposition of the straight and far out lifestyles of our protaganists. Other turns by Reece Witherspoon as Doc’s Deputy D.A. sort-of main squeeze; Katherine Waterson as Shasta Fay, Doc’s ‘ex-old lady’ who leads him into the labyrinth, and even – wow- Eric Roberts(!) as the missing Mickey Wolfmann are all suitably on the money.

In tone (as you’ll undoubtedly expect if you’ve seen the trailer below) the film is Anderson’s lightest for years. It’s not the slapstick-fest you may be expecting from the trailer, but its central performance by Joaquin Phoenix as Doc contains a vast amount of physical comedy. Phoenix has always been a deeply physical actor, but here his facial mugging almost steals the show. An inveterate stoner’s habits mean that dialogue comes thick and…err, thick. More than one reviewer has pointed to one scene between Doc and Owen Wilson (as it turns out, the real point of the movie) as junky sax player and snitch, Coy Harlingen which is all but unintelligible. But when it comes to Inherent Vice, it’s appropriate that it’s the vibe which pervades the entirety which is the most wonderful thing. Not since Boogie Nights has the director been this jolly.

As mentioned above, the numerous Black Panther, Manson Family, Aryan Brotherhood, Vietnam, L.A. music scene, Nixon etc. references mean that maybe this is just a film set to entrance only the likes of me and my crazy ‘niche’ tastes. But I’d like to think not.

When it comes to the music, I can take or leave the Debussy-liteisms of Jonny Greenwood. It works just fine. But the other stuff is a whole heap of ‘60s and ‘70s goodness. Any film that opens with Can’s ‘Vitamin C’  and also features some Les Baxter already has me halfway there. But as Anderson has said in recent interviews: the real musical inspiration of Inherent Vice comes from Neil Young; in particular, his three post-Harvest era masterpieces. Two numbers (Harvest and Journey Through The Past) feature prominently in the soundtrack.

The yearning in Neil feels just right. If there was an NY album that Inherent Vice put me in mind of most, it was On The Beach. The mellow but wary-as-fuck, post-Manson killings vibe is all offset by endless sea and sunshine or twinkling beach front cafes and faux-medieval Topanga mansions filled with tanned ‘teeners’ as Shasta Fay describes them to Doc. But there’s already a sense that the good stuff happened long ago, there are too many memories, too many ex-old ladys, too much paranoia. The lost love does finally come home, but only to tell Doc that she’s not back. And the nemesis pops round to knock down his door, apologise and finally eat his stash. Bummer.

How much of this feeling is from Pynchon I have yet to discover. I feel the need to read it. Any regular readers will know that I raved about Anderson’s last work: The Master. And while Inherent Vice immediately resides inside me in a place that’s closer to my heart, that’s weighed against the fact that The Master had life-defining performances by Phoenix and the late Philip Seymour Hoffmann. Time will tell no doubt tell which film wins, but in the meantime, if you want to see one more film about the death of the hippie ideal, make it this one. It’s brilliant.

Inherent Vice is released in the UK on 30 January.

Read this post without blinking... The Master (2012)

'…we move further away from Tarkovsky time towards moron-time in which nothing can last - and no one can concentrate on anything for longer than about two seconds. Soon people will not be able to watch films like Theo Angelopoulos's Ulysses Gaze or to read Henry James because they will not have the concentration to get from on interminable scene or sentence to the next.' (Geoff Dyer, Zona - a book about a film about a journey to a room)

It'll come as no surprise to anyone who has watched (or endured, depending on how you view such things) Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film, The Master that it's aroused strong debate. His films always do. But the debate seems so, well… quotidian. Is the film boring? Pointless? or (worst of all) pretentious? Overlong? Well yes it is all of these in places. But look at Dyer's quote above (which is about Tarkovsky's Stalker) and you see the problem. 

Personally the film is fascinating because it dares to be ambiguous about the worth of modern spiritual and philosophical leaders. Critics who seem disappointed that that the film isn't a straight  biopic of  Scientology founder and all-round scamster L Ron Hubbard seem to have ignored the recent interviews with Anderson where he states categorically that the entire basis for The Master was Hubbard. But instead of an easy hatchet job (reading the Wikipedia entry for LRH is hilarious. he even managed to scam money from other notorious spiritual con artists) Anderson gives a balanced power struggle based on mutual need for people to find meaning following wartime service and also the need for those who would lead us astray and fleece us to validate their causes by adopting the truly hopeless among us. Trust me, try attending any spiritual/self help group any night of the week and you'll find plenty of fuck-ups. Whether the promised epiphanies follow is down to your own view of such things.

The central protagonist/anti-hero, Freddie Quell seems to be as much of a con artist as his substitute father/lover, the pseudo-guru, Lancaster Dodd (played with beaming, effervescent bounce and verve countered by a streak of vicious meanness by Philip Seymour Hoffman: a man who, I think we can all agree, no matter what dreck he's in gives stunning performances). Freddie's damage, we finally learn comes from the effect of WWII. He's a PTS case, cruelly stunted by his duties. ie: killing several japanese soldiers. Following the war he drifts into chemical abuse and through several jobs until his and Dodds' fates become entwined on a wealthy benefactress' yacht.

Before seeing The Master I read two significant pieces on the film. The first was this month's edition of Sight & Sound which, predictably, regards Anderson as an auteur and whose films always represent genuine attempts to challenge our notion of cinema (phew). The other was Rachel Cooke's main review in The Observer.

Cooke made The Master her film of the week, tacitly acknowledging its importance while then proceeding to slate it for its seeming pointlessness. But what really got to me was her opening paragraph where she seems to be taking a swipe at the male cineaste hegemony and their unswerving devotion to a man they regard as a Master in his own right (see what I did there?): 

'Paul Thomas Anderson is the critics' director, or one of them – and as if to prove it, at the press show of his latest epic, The Master, there were agonised male groans (my emphasis) when it was announced that, rather than watching 70mm film, we would have to make do with digital (insoluble technical problem, apparently). Not that many of us left our seats, even though some had already seen the film at Venice, or wherever. This is how much the critics love Anderson: most were ready and willing to submerge themselves in his film's murky depths again, digital or not.'

While I see her point  I can't help feeling that this is sexual politics at the expense of something that raises itself well above such banality. 

Is nerdiness a male trope? Maybe, but if so isn't that preferable to other more socially acceptable male tropes? Frankly, I'd rather have a conversation about the lost original print of David Lynch's Dune or the structuralism of Peter Greenaway's early shorts (his films, not his actual shorts, although I could happily talk about that too, if needed) than about how Chelsea are doing this season or whether Kim Kardashian is 'fit'.

The Master isn't (to my mind) remotely sexist. It portrays a man who's unable to relate to women in any adult, meaningful way. We discover that Freddie left his teen bride-to-be behind, running away from his dysfunctional home life in an attempt to grow up and allow her to come of age. But this seems to have stopped his own sexual development in the process. Only right at the end when he's finally left/been rejected by Dodd's Cause does he have sex on screen. Up until that point he's shown to either abdicate any responsibility (he gets dead drunk and passes out when propositioned by a woman) or behaves like a naughty schoolboy, dry humping a woman made of sand on the shores of Iwo Jima or some such Pacific shore or slyly writing lewd notes to women on Dodd's borrowed yacht as they dutifully transcribe the Master's ponderous pontifications. The key scene is the one where, as Dodd lasciviously prances to some bawdy Elizabethan ballad, we suddenly it scene from Freddie's stoned perspective - with all the women undressed. It's a juvenile view of female sexuality, a childish peep show.

Yet following this scene it's both men who are upbraided by the steely wife, Peggy (played marvellously by Amy Adams). Dodd who is warned about any dalliances in a scene that must rate as the most astonishing of the year (it involves a hand job as a reinforcement technique) and Freddie, who through the film shows incredible inventiveness in his ability to whip up mind-blowing cocktails from anything to hand - is warned to kick the booze. By the end of the film you're left in no doubt who the real power behind the throne is, while Dodd can only sadly sing a sad song of unrequited love to Quell. 

To address Cooke's other main points: namely that the film's too long, is full of boring repetition and that (worst crime of all) it ends up with nothing solved and with no answers, essentially leaving us back at the beginning - well, has she never seen, say, 2001 (actually, probably not - no women and no answers - real manly stuff)? Firstly, who says that a film has to have a linear progressive narrative? Surely we dispensed with that notion around the time of Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera? Also, the film does have a narrative thread , it just has to do with the fact that both men hold each other in some kind of stasis but are ultimately unchangeable on a basic level. Yet at the denouement Dodd is obviously on an upward trajectory of wealth and power, while Freddie seems to have learned to cross the male-female divide. 

As for repetition, well of course, this is how Dodd bends people to his will, and this film wouldn't be true to its subject matter if it didn't represent exactly what he's peddling, would it?

So how does The Master fair amongst critics in general? Surprisingly well, given its heavy subject. A single-star panning from The Mail seems to be a big plus for Anderson. If it's pissing off the Home Counties he must be on the right track. Both the ES and Independent seem to acknowledge the film's skill and importance and, most amazingly, The Sun loved it! There's a double-edged compliment for you… 

In the end, despite Sight & Sound's habitation of the cineaste zone that Rachel Cooke seems to object to, their review by Nick Pinkerton seems to contain the most accurate summation: 'It's not a great film, but it has a great film rattling around inside it'. 

As with all Anderson's films, ugliness and the terrible power of loneliness are never shied away from. Joaquin Phoenix's portrayal of Freddie never once lapses into sentimentality, his parasitic nature, grim self-loathing and just general vileness never falter for a second. I think it's the best performance I've seen on screen for a long time.

And Cooke's a fine writer, but on this point (and I'm taking this out of context - on this particular Sunday all of her reviews for the week's releases grated somewhat - seeming to be more about her ability to turn a poetic phrase than actually give critical insight) she seems wrongheaded. Maybe as a literary critic she's less well-suited to write on such matters. 

I really hate to snipe at other writers, but in this instance I came away wanting to lock Cooke in a room with a screening of Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse. 

Then she'd know the true power of boredom and repetition.