![]() Robert Altman, explicitly a touchstone for Anderson in Magnolia, provides further inspiration for this adaptation in his contemporary re-working of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1973). ![]() A line is easily drawn through its hardboiled antecedents, from the pulp fiction of Chandler, Cain and Hammett, through the great film noir. Like Boogie Nights, Inherent Vice invokes the spaciness of 1970s LA, but moves beyond its predecessor in evoking the political paranoia and discord of this period, and unlike Punch-Drunk Love it clearly draws on an established literary and cinematic genealogy. So where does Inherent Vice fit within the Paul Thomas Anderson oeuvre? Like Magnolia (1999), it is a film set in LA with a huge ensemble cast seasoned with stars (Benicio del Toro, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Eric Roberts and Martin Short). Punch-Drunk Love, the Anderson film to which Inherent Vice has been compared on the basis of its humour, is more inwardly focussed and more jaggedly unconventional, as unmoored from its chosen genre of romantic comedy as a studio film could be. While Boogie Nights (1997) superficially covers similar territory, its focus on the nascent porn industry dissected a distinct sub-culture. Inherent Vice belongs with this latter group, occurring in a time and place familiar to Anderson, who was born in 1970. All his films are set in the American west, with the majority in his native Los Angeles (including Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and There Will be Blood). ![]() Anderson has previously worked from his own original scripts, with the exception of There Will be Blood (2007), a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!. This is the first film adaptation of a Pynchon novel, a writer long considered unadaptable, directed by a self-confessed fan boy. Anderson has described how he took the character of Sortilège and “made her a bit bigger and gave her narration and made her more of a sidekick. This development creates a space for Anderson to depart from the trademark noir male narration, confounding expectations of a cynical, world-weary Philip Marlowe or Jeff Bailey type. One major change by Anderson is to create a narrator by expanding a minor character from the novel, Sortilège (Joanna Newsom). A drug cartel (or tax avoidance structure?) going by the juicy handle Golden Fang, a right wing cabal called Vigilant California and a brothel proudly advertising its “pussy eaters’ special” fill out this crazy portrait of America writ large.Īnderson’s sprawling canvass is directly linked to its source, with much of Pynchon’s dialogue adopted verbatim. This simple investigative quest springboards Doc into encounters with a cavalcade of characters including strung out hippies, Aryan Brotherhood bikers, Black Panthers-like revolutionaries, morose LAPD cops, FBI agents, drugged up dentists and double agent saxophonists. She wants Doc’s help in foiling a plot to fleece her real estate mogul boyfriend Mickey Wolfmann, who Doc deduces is a “Gentleman of the straightworld persuasion.” Although rooted in noir and the hardboiled tradition, Inherent Vice is anything but a purist work. ![]() Both film and novel open with Doc’s old flame, flower child Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), emerging from out of the past. Inherent Vice wastes no time acknowledging its generic underpinnings. While central character Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a hippie private investigator, lives a laidback existence in a beachside suburb, repeated allusions to the Manson Family place us in ominously post-Altamont territory. Set against the backdrop of the Nixon Presidency and Ronald Reagan’s term as Governor of California in 1970, the film pivots on a moment in time when the counterculture curdled. With Paul Thomas Anderson’s auteur standing complementing Thomas Pynchon’s literary eminence and pop culture savvy, Inherent Vice (2014) promises to be a cinephile’s dream.
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