At the movies: Michael Wood writing about Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice in @LRB

[James Robertson]

*At the Movies, Michael Wood*


There is a difference between being slow and being sluggish, although it’s
not easy to define. Perhaps we’re sluggish if we’re failing to make
progress. If we’re slow, there may not be any progress to make. In a slow
movie, we can pay attention to the scenery, the outfits, the accents and
think about what’s in the corner of the frame. We can remember there used
to be something called a Princess phone, even if the name doesn’t come to
us straightaway when we see a private detective using it all the time,
making it his best supporting actor. In a sluggish movie we keep looking at
our watch and it seems to have stopped. Paul Thomas Anderson’s *Inherent
Vice* is more slow than sluggish but pretty sluggish all the same.

Anderson wrote the adaptation himself and clearly loves the 2009 Thomas
Pynchon novel he is adapting. He follows its plot and quotes from it a good
deal. He even invents a voiceover narrative so that he can quote more. This
device is so creaky that it’s attractive, and it’s not a bad movie
translation of Pynchon’s antique (that is, 1970s-sounding), slangy prose.
The narrator, our ears tell us, is one of the characters, an ex-girlfriend
with psychic gifts whom the hero treats as another person would his
analyst. She’s called Sortilège, it says in the credits (and in the novel),
although all I heard is the name Lige, pronounced ‘leej’. She has all kinds
of good lines, but there is a narrative promise in such a role that the
film can’t keep. This becomes a problem, in spite of the charm of the old
device. A person who is in the story is also outside the story. She must
know something, must have a reason for her extra assignment. She doesn’t,
she just talks now and then.

This isn’t her fault: the movie doesn’t have any extra knowledge to give
her. The trouble is, it doesn’t know what to do with the plot it doesn’t
care about. Pynchon simultaneously sets up and solves the same dilemma by
combining a parody of a hard-boiled detective novel with some disorderly
chunks of the real thing. His hero has ‘a chronic problem telling one
California blonde from another’, and we find it hard to distinguish among
the supposedly different sets of semi-crooks, and between friends and foes.
Is the cop who keeps harassing the private detective his nemesis or his
best, brutal friend? The detective decides the cop is not his brother ‘but
he sure needs a keeper’. His sidekick says: ‘It ain’t you, Doc.’ The
detective says: ‘I know. Too bad, in a way.’ We don’t know whether this
means friend or foe. Perhaps it means both, but the detective’s doped-out
kindness is more interesting than the riddle.

The general model would be something like *The Big Sleep*: not the Raymond
Chandler novel but the Howard Hawks movie that Chandler said he couldn’t
understand, although he had worked on it. This effect is relatively easy to
achieve in a book since the voice is not a voiceover, it’s a textual voice.
The voice could *be* the novel. It’s obviously not impossible to get the
effect on film, with or without voiceover, but it’s hard, and a movie plot
that keeps getting lost is apt to feel just lost.

There are some great performances here from Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin,
Katherine Waterston, Jena Malone, Owen Wilson. Phoenix is Doc Sportello,
the private detective. His vast sideburns and crumpled denims make him look
like a sheriff who has strayed from the old West and gone further west.
Gone to pot too, as we might say, although he says he doesn’t do serious
drugs any more. Just a lot of weed, a bit of laughing gas, and the
occasional sniff of cocaine. He is a little spaced out even from this
modest consumption, invariably late in focusing on whatever the matter in
hand might be, but he seems fully even if sleepily aware of all the trouble
he keeps letting himself in for. He takes a case with more threads and
suspects than he (or we) can handle, and solves some of it in his own
fashion. This fashion doesn’t please John Brolin as Bigfoot, the
crony/tormentor cop, who wanted more arrests. Katherine Waterston is very
persuasive as Doc’s returning old flame, a beach girl who has got herself
involved in an elaborate scheme to take a rich man’s money from him; and
Jena Malone as Hope Harlingen all but steals the film with her tale of how
she met her husband, Coy, in the toilet of a club where he was playing in
the band, all the drugs they did, and how she got her shiny new teeth.
‘Heroin,’ she says, ‘sucks the calcium out of your system like a vampire,
use it any length of time and your teeth go all to hell. And that’s the
good part.’ Now she’s clean and a drug counsellor. He’s supposed to be dead
but she knows he’s not. One of Doc’s missions is to find him. Owen Wilson
is the drawling, whispering man to be found, an informant to several
different nefarious groups, and Doc certainly finds him, again and again.
No allegory, least of all one constructed by Pynchon, would want Hope and
Coy to stay apart for ever – this is the writer who invented the Hobbesian
law firm of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short.

The plot we are not supposed to care about involves a real-estate baron, a
drug cartel named the Golden Fang (as in vampire), and the FBI, who may be
the worst villains of all because they wear suits and pick their noses,
although not for those reasons alone. The satire becomes clear and
effective at times. The rich man, tired of ruining the Los Angeles
landscape and being a target for robbery, decides to give all his money
away. This is the real problem, and the good guys and the bad guys get
together to stave off this reprehensible act. We see and hear him for a
moment, heavily drugged, barely coherent, scared.

The place he is kept allows for one of the two wonderful set-pieces in the
film. It’s a hospital so white you have to keep thinking of Hope’s teeth,
and Doc, following a sketchy clue or two, is pretending to be a future
investor. He’s shown around by an unctuous doctor, sees a man with a
swastika on his face (no, it’s a sign of peace, his guide says), and a
group of patients dressed up as Tibetan monks – Owen Wilson is literally
undercover here since they all have vast hoods. They have Chablis in the
waiting-room, and the inmates watch terrible old movies all the time. This
would be brainwashing if anyone had a brain left. Presumably all these
patients were once very rich. It’s when he sees the FBI men in charge that
Doc gets worried.

The other good set-piece is in a dentist’s office – a second home of the
fang. The place is sumptuously decorated in the worst possible taste, the
dentist wears a purple Beatles-era suit, screws his receptionist and his
patients, and genially offers Doc a heavy snort of coke. The American
Dental Association, it seems, is the cover-up organisation for all the
evil-doing in the movie.

The best sustained joke, though, as distinct from these wild constructions,
occurs when Doc meets not the real bad guy but a figure very high up in the
bad-guy world. This is a man whose daughter Doc rescued from her wanderings
in the past and returned to her loving family. It’s clear she was much
better off wandering, but a detective’s insight can only go so far or come
too late. In the old days she was a victim of the purple-suited dentist,
and her father is eloquent in his distaste for such molesters: ‘The man
preyed on an emotionally vulnerable child, tore her from the embrace of a
loving family, forced her to engage in sexual practices that might appal
even a sophisticate like yourself.’ Like Doc, that is, although it’s not
the word anyone else would choose. There is worse, though, and now we enter
the territory of *The Big Lebowski*. ‘How about when he forced my little
girl to listen to *original cast albums* of Broadway musicals while he had
his way with her? The tastelessly decorated resort hotel rooms he took her
to during endodontist conventions? The wallpaper! The lamps!’ There’s vice
for you. The italics are Pynchon’s, but you can hear them in the movie too.

In the film as in the novel Doc is told what the phrase ‘inherent vice’
means. Didn’t he know already? Didn’t we? I didn’t until I read the novel.
It’s a term in maritime insurance for what can’t be helped, ‘what you can’t
avoid’, and therefore can’t be insured. It applies to cargo and ships, and
Doc thinks it might be used metaphorically for Los Angeles. Either the
premium is going to be too high or nothing will be covered. Que sera, sera,
as Doc says, quoting Doris Day, but he’s not a fatalist, he knows that what
matters is not whether vice is inherent or not (‘like original sin’, he
says in the novel) but who gets to include it in their calculations.

—
James J. Robertson
@jamesjrobertson
james at themutedposthorn.com
themutedposthorn.com <http://www.themutedposthorn.com>
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