Rent Inherent Vice (2014)

Funky Afternoons - Inherent Vice review by Count Otto Black

This is the first attempt to bring one of Thomas Pynchon's massive, labyrinthine novels to the screen, and it has all the problems you might expect. The plot, in which a permanently stoned private eye stumbles into increasingly elaborate interlinked conspiracies while around him the Swinging Sixties curdle into the Selfish Seventies, is frequently baffling. Just about everybody in the film is either part of this vast shadowy enterprise or is coincidentally linked to it, but it's impossible to keep track of how it all fits together. Supposedly major characters barely appear in the movie, and one very important plot thread involves the murder a long time ago of somebody who isn't in the movie at all by somebody who suddenly pops up towards the end, by which time the narrator has to remind us who he is and why should we care about him. I couldn't even figure out whether the hero was meant to be a doctor who somehow gets away with being a private eye instead of making the slightest attempt to do his actual job, or a private eye whose office is in a hospital for some reason that's no doubt hilarious if you what it is because you've read the book.

It's fascinating, in a slightly infuriating way, but also oddly un-cinematic. People talk to each other at length in order to cram in as much of Pynchon's weird but superbly crafted dialogue as possible, but too often we're told about something we don't actually see. A supposedly dead but very much alive rock star talks about his career but we never see him play. A huge gang of neo-Nazi bikers are set up as adversaries and lurk menacingly in the background but do almost nothing that we ever witness. A mysterious ship is constantly referred to and glimpsed in the distance but we never see what happens on it (though somebody does tell us). And most bizarrely of all, in a film featuring constant drug use, a bad trip crucial to the plot is represented by the camera going out of focus!

Paul Thomas Anderson was presumably chosen because "Boogie Nights" is the quintessential cynical seventies movie, but maybe if they had to have a director called Anderson, they should have gone with Wes? Because this film gives us an oddly twisted vision of the early seventies, in which authority figures are one-dimensional mad fascists, women are one-dimensional sex-toys, 99% of hippies are heroin addicts, and every voice you hear is Thomas Pynchon talking through a sock-puppet with a ludicrous name. This works far better on the page than it does on the screen, especially with a hero who is nearly always stoned and tends to mumble. We need some amazing though not necessarily realistic visuals to distract us from these shortcomings, and we simply don't get them.

"The Big Lebowski" is very similar but better, with much more interesting and engaging characters. Robert Altman's weird take on "The Long Goodbye" has a lot of almost identical plot elements (including a very major one which "Inherent Vice" basically turns back to front), and gives us a more realistic but equally cynical view of the early years of the Me Decade. And I think perhaps "Inherent Vice" is halfway trying to be the third film in the "Chinatown" trilogy that never got made after "The Two Jakes" flopped. Unfortunately, in the end it's an ambitious attempt to create something extraordinary that doesn't quite come off.

Dismal and disappointing - Inherent Vice review by CP Customer

It's taken me a while to warm to Anderson as a director: I thought "Boogie Nights" was ho-hum and loathed the arrogant pretentious soap of "Magnolia", but really sat up and took notice at the grandeur and dark beauty of "There Will Be Blood" and even the skewed, frustrating "The Master". So, when I heard he'd done a Pynchon adaptation I was verrrry interested. I'm not a huge Pynchon fan: I've read two of his novels, including nine months spent getting through "Gravity's Rainbow", but he intrigues me, and it sounded like this was going to be a great, intelligent and complex 70s noir thing to equal "The Big Lebowski" or even "The Long Goodbye".

It doesn't come close.

This is, in fact, a long, dull, deadly disappointing trudge of a film, that paradoxically crams in too much plot and somehow ends up with none. A great cast is utterly wasted, relationships and chemistry are non-existent, and characters mill about and unload wadges of exposition by either whispering or mumbling or both. There is absolutely no texture or context to this whole thing, none of the cinematic language that would be needed to evoke any sort of atmosphere. Nobody seems to really have anything to do with anybody else as faceless and dull characters drift in and out and in again. There's an oh-so brief flicker of style when Martin Short appears as a coked-up dentist and for about a scene everything goes up a gear into a coke-paced, paranoid frenzy, but then it's back to people mumbling and/or whispering plot points to each other. More criminally, there is absolutely no effort to evoke any sort of period or sense of history. I'm pretty sure Pynchon chose the era with care, that teetering epoch between the dog-ends of flower power and the rise of Nixon and the Moral Majority, but this film doesn't seem to give a toss. Like everything else, it's left at the side of the road on this long, hard slog.

A dreadful, dreadful waste of time, talent and film stock.

What, who, where, when and more importantly why? - Inherent Vice review by CP Customer

I'm impressed with Count Otto Black's review as he obviously took time out of his life to actually watch this fim to the end and attempt to understand it, I however allowed it about 20 minutes after which I said, "no, I have more important things to do in my life than subject my brain to total clap trap."