Inherent Vice, for what it's worth

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Saw it today. IV ties with Bleeding Edge as my least favorite Pynchon novel. I have a hunch - absolutely not backed up by any facts, mind you - that back in the day, while Pynchon was living in southern California, writing his masterpiece, that he thought it would be cool to write a noir detective story set in that time and place, but didn't get to do so until many years later, when the idea was less fresh.

So I went in with low expectations. I can say that IV isn't a horrible movie (something I couldn't say about Interstellar, for example), but it's not very good either. I certainly wouldn't dissuade anyone, Pynchon fan or not, from seeing it. But I don't think PT Anderson was a good choice to adapt/direct it, and Joaquin Phoenix, aside from opening his eyes wide on cue to evince paranoia, didn't add anything special to the role of Doc Sportello.

Just as Spielberg can never walk away from hokey emotion, PT Anderson can't resist a chance to be ponderous. The musical score, by Jonny Greenwood (who also did the score for The Master - a warning), was heavy on the violins. Violins as a backdrop for hippie noir??? Seriously? The violins welled up in the very first scene, and all of the music throughout the movie seemed to serve as an unwanted Muzak track obscuring the impact of the dialogue (much of which was direct from Pynchon). It was such a poor use of music that it made me wish I could step into a parallel universe where Kubrick (master of movie music!) was the adaptor/director (preferably, as long as we're in a different universe, of GR). The ponderousness was at its worse during a somber, drawn-out scene, violins sawing away furiously, depicting an encounter between Doc and Shasta (a passing scene in the book, and far, far from anywhere remotely near Pynchon's best). Delivered this way, the scene had all the gravitas (but none of the content) of being the definitive moral core of the entire movie. It made me cringe.

Aside from that, there were no scenes that were truly memorable. A problem with PT Anderson's editing instincts, I think. And how anyone could adapt the book without Soul Gidget is beyond me. The art-house audience seemed to love the movie, but only a hipster with a solid backbone would be able to critique the heady mix of Big Names and pot. Not sure that there are either the show-stopping scenes or hilarious catch phrases required to turn this into a cult film.

Laura
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