Pynchon and Anderson’s world is a fluid, shape-shifting one in which every conversation is an exercise in doublespeak and people change identities as frequently as they change their clothes. It’s the start of a pretzel-shaped trail that snakes across the Southland from the rolling surf to the concrete “flatlands” east of the 405, and from low-rent petty criminals to the corridors of government power (i.e., bigger criminals), and where nothing is as it first - or even secondarily - appears. And before Doc can so much as follow a lead, Mickey - and Shasta - promptly vanish into the ether. She’s the obligatory woman in trouble who sets “Vice’s” psychedelic Raymond Chandler plot in motion, showing up unannounced on Doc’s doorstep spouting claims of a conspiratorial plot involving her current lover, a deep-pocketed real-estate magnate named Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), whose wife may be angling to commit him to a loony bin. That includes Shasta Fay Hepworth (leggy, lissome newcomer Katherine Waterston, daughter of Sam), an ex of Doc’s for whom the flame still burns. Indeed, in “Inherent Vice,” everyone is hiding out from something. But then, as Pynchon writes, American life is “something to be escaped from” - a line Anderson repeats verbatim in the film - which means good business for PIs and drug dealers alike. (Pynchon modeled the fictional South Bay town on Manhattan Beach, where he lived in the late ’60s during the writing of “Gravity’s Rainbow”).Īmong the locals is Larry “Doc” Sportello ( Joaquin Phoenix, sporting Groucho Marx eyebrows and Elvis sideburns), who runs his private-eye business out of a medical office and seems to spend considerably more time scoring grass than solving cases. The year is 1970 and the place Gordita Beach, a fragile ecosystem of surfers, psychics and sandal-clad shamuses in danger of disappearing from the map. If “Inherent Vice” couldn’t, on its surface, seem to have less in common with Anderson’s previous pic, the fictionalized Scientology origins story “The Master,” it is, just beneath, another sympathetic portrait of wayward souls clambering for solid ground in war-torn America (albeit with the relative optimism of the ’40s replaced by a blanket of Nixonian paranoia). But a devoted cult awaits the Warner Bros. Not for all tastes (including the Academy’s), this unapologetically weird, discursive and totally delightful whatsit will repel staid multiplex-goers faster than a beaded, barefoot hippie in a Beverly Hills boutique. Freely but faithfully adapted by Anderson from Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 detective novel - the first of the legendary author’s works to reach the screen - Anderson’s seventh feature film is a groovy, richly funny stoner romp that has less in common with “The Big Lebowski” than with the strain of fatalistic, ’70s-era California noirs (“Chinatown,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Night Moves”) in which the question of “whodunit?” inevitably leads to an existential vanishing point. The film has already polarised critics in America and what the British critical fraternity will make of it is anyone’s guess… One thing’s for sure though – Anderson’s legions of fans will be queuing round the block to see Inherent Vice.The good-vibing ’60s are slip-sliding away in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice,” and along with them a certain idea of pre-Vietnam, pre-Manson California life - of boho beach towns and uncommodified counterculture soon to be washed away by a tsunami of gentrification, social conservatism and Reaganomics. It’s interesting to note that once again the wunderkind is choosing to make a period piece (many of his previous films have been set in the mid-20th century The Master, There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights). It’s hard to accurately discern the tone of the film from the rather absurdist trailer, but it looks like it is both dark and comedic – like so much of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work. The film, like the novel, is set in 1970s Los Angeles and follows the trials and tribulations of Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a private investigator with a penchant for marijuana. Not to mention the fact that it’s based on a novel by one of the greatest active American writers Thomas Pynchon. Inherent Vice has become one of the most highly anticipated films of early 2015, due to its all-star cast, crime/comedy caper plot and the fact that it’s directed by one of the finest American directors working today Paul Thomas Anderson.
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