Sometimes, after watching a movie you feel as dizzy as the characters, and since most of them were constantly smoking weed in ‘Inherent Vice’, especially Joaquin Phoenix, I am still high from last night… Watching the premiere of the movie at the Egyptian theater was very surreal too, I caught Joaquin Phoenix entering the place, he walked by very fast, but I still I got close to him for a few seconds, and yes girls, he looked totally handsome, even better than on picture…. Awwww! In the movie, it’s another story, he has ugly sideburns and cultivates the 70s hippie look with a joint in the corner of his lips and a sort of Hunter S. Thompson aura – that must be the constant drug trip, but he also had the hat and sunglasses….
Inside, I was sitting quite close to Eric Roberts (yes Julia’s brother is also in the movie), and, amusingly, he was head banging at Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’ before the movie! Paul Thomas Anderson very briefly introduced the film, which was shown for the first time in Los Angeles that Paul calls ‘home’. If there is one thing I understood in the movie, it is this celebration of the city of angels in all its 1970 glory, but for the rest of the story, it’s exactly like the picture of Joaquin Phoenix I took while he was hurrying up to get inside the theater, it is very fuzzy! Half way through the film, I realize, I should stop trying to make sense of any of it, and I said to myself, let’s enjoy the trip, because it’s a hell of a trip. This story has more characters than a Dostoyevsky’s novel, more non-sense than a David Lynch’s scenario, and it has the feeling of a cult-movie-in-the-making, in the Tarantino’s Pulp fiction tradition.
It’s a film noir, a detective fiction story a la Raymond Chandler but it’s also a comedy, it’s quite funny even though you are never sure of what’s going on… But above everything else it’s an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel which has been described as ‘part-noir, part-psychedelic romp’, during which ‘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’. Doc Sportello is of course played by Joaquin Phoenix who is present in every scene of the movie, and as we see him encounter more and more characters, the plot becomes more and more surrealist and goes into all directions like a LA freeway network. As nothing was really making sense to me, I let myself be carried away by the dense flow of scenes and cryptic but funny dialogues, like the ones between Doc Sportello (Phoenix) and LAPD Detective Bigfoot (Josh Brolin). If you are someone who likes to connect the dots during an investigation, this movie is not for you because dots are not even there and we never get to the point to even make a connection between this LA society levels through which Sportello navigates… We are transported in 1970 fictional Gordita beach in California, when Doc Sportello starts to investigate a mystery around his ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, Sam’s daughter) involving Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) described as ‘a westside Hochdeutsch mafia, biggest of the big, construction, savings and loans, untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace, technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi’… Wolfmann disappears, and then enters in the scene LAPD Detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, called a renaissance detective by the LA Times, but described as a ‘flattop of Flintstone proportions’ and a malicious ‘twinkle in his eye that says civil rights violations.’ Right now you have understood how colorful these characters are, and how cartoonish I was seeing them, as the recurrent ‘what’s up doc?’ addressed to Sportello helped a lot. At the top of this, Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a surf-sax legend and former heroin addict (of course) has also vanished and may be dead, but his wife, Hope Harlingen (Jena Malone), asks Doc to investigate his disappearance… Somehow Coy has turned to government agent (or something like this) and this leads Doc to the shadow organization Golden Fang, which could be either a boat, a Chinese drug cartel, a rehab center (the Chryskylodon Institute), or even a tax-dodging dentist association fronted by Dr. Blatnoyd (a hilarious snorting-cocaine Martin Short), ‘or something even more vast’… But there are many more characters and intrigues, including white supremacists, black Panthers ex-cons, and a semi-goddess named Sortilege (musician Joanna Newsom) who ‘always seemed to know things that nobody else knew’, Sportello’s conscience, who also plays the voice over during the movie,… not that it helped me to understand anything!
All along the movie, you encounter more colorful characters and femmes fatales than you will in your lifetime, and Paul Thomas is sort of revisiting the Los Angeles of Boogie Nights with a film noir approach, Charlie Manson’s girls in the background, a gag-filled scenario, California’s mythology and its paranoid obsession with rehab centers, dubious cults, and vast conspiracy theories … it is probably filled with tons of obscure cultural references that totally escaped me (that pizza scene that obviously looks like the Bible’s last supper!) but the booklet they handed out at the premiere, with the cast of all these characters, help me a lot to sort out this constant stream of new characters.
Inherent Vice is part Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential, The Big Lebowski or even Muholland Drive (I was equally confused after seeing it), it’s a surrealist and impenetrable acid trip in a Chuck Jones cartoon. The movie will disorient you and will leave you very confused, even the dialogues sometimes sound like codes and the characters are never clearly explained. Apparently Anderson worked in close contact with Pynchon, and was more interested to make you feel the same way than the book made him feel, rather than make sense of anything in the plot… it’s a challenging and ambitious movie, it’s an exercise about how well Anderson could adapt something basically unadaptable, and it’s a long film too, 148 minutes, rhythmically scored by Jonny Greenwood’s mysterious violin and eerie guitar, but also Neil Young (‘Harvest’, ‘Journey Through the Past’), Can, Sam Cooke, Minnie Riperton and obscure tracks by The Tornadoes, The Cascades, The Markettts… now give me some time to read this Pynchon’s 384-page novel, it may clarify a few points,… or not… oh fuck it, just enjoy the ride.
