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

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks!

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:00 PM, James Robertson
<james at themutedposthorn.com> wrote:
> 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
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l