Inherent vice parents guide11/5/2023 ![]() Doc is told to beware of it by Jade (Hong Chau), who is working at Chick Planet when he first bumps into her, and who then crops up at random junctures, like a hitchhiker. What we get is shards, some more glittering than others. Will his audience be overjoyed to realize, around the ninety-minute mark, just how little of “Inherent Vice” is going to be wrapped up nice and neat? Hmm. Does Anderson stay loyal to that vision for two and a half hours? Absolutely. The nailing of one crime will simply reveal another, deeper one, and then another, and so on, until you arrive at the vision of a society that is already cracked and crazed. At least there was a solution to the ardent Pynchonite, however, making sense of any mystery makes no sense at all. He, too, was looking for a vanished man with an English spouse, on the verge of the Pacific, and his search, like Doc’s, involved poking around a sanatorium for the mentally vexed, but what lent the puzzle its loose charm was the fact that Marlowe could only just be bothered to solve it, as opposed to staying home with his cat. ![]() If that reminds you of chewed-over Chandler, you’re not wrong, and one of the fables on which “Inherent Vice” ruminates is “The Long Goodbye,” and the loping, unflustered movie that Robert Altman made of it, in 1973, with Elliott Gould as Marlowe. In a separate subplot-which turns out, naturally, not to be separate at all-Doc is hired by Hope Harlingen (Jena Malone), a former junkie with false choppers, to find her husband, Coy (Owen Wilson), missing and presumed not dead. He wakes up beside a corpse: one of Mickey’s bodyguards. So says Shasta, who then disappears, as does Mickey, by which time Doc has been knocked out cold, at the Chick Planet massage parlor. Mickey has an English wife, and she has a lover, too, and together they are making plans for Mickey. He is visited by an ex-girlfriend named Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), who is now entwined with a hot-shot property developer, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). In the soup, from the start, is Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a private investigator living in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County. True, that’s not saying much, but at least you can tease out noodles of story line here and there. Above all, “Inherent Vice” brings us Pynchon the plotter at his tightest. It also maintains his high standard of social indignation, taunting “that endless middle-class cycle of choices that are no choices at all”-ouch!-and making you wonder, as always, how a doomsayer of his stripe should have proved such good company for so long. Well, of all Pynchon’s novels, it may be the most gag-infested. ![]() So, what possessed Anderson to approach “Inherent Vice”? If you really have a mind to write a screenplay based on “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), go right ahead, but be warned: you won’t have a mind by the end of it. Nobody has ever turned a Pynchon book into a movie before, for the same reason that nobody has managed to cram the New York Philharmonic into a Ford Focus. The adaptation alone deserves an award for valor. The new Paul Thomas Anderson film, “Inherent Vice,” comes from the 2009 novel of that name, by Thomas Pynchon.
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