Anderson: Inherent Vice (2014)

Inherent Vice marks Paul Thomas Anderson’s return to ensemble film-making, but this time around it’s an ensemble that proceeds sequentially rather than simultaneously, in an effort to capture Thomas Pynchon’s elusive novel, and prose style, on the big screen. Like most noirs or neo-noirs, the plot is too convoluted to do justice in a short description, except to say that it revolves around Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquim Phoenix), a hippy PI whose investigation into his ex-girlfriend’s disappearance leads him into the jaws of a conspiracy that ripples out across 1970 Los Angeles and into the present day. While Doc moves through an ensemble cast that includes Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, Katherine Waterston, Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short and Jena Malone among many others, he never spends enough time with anyone for them to settle or stabilise into a character, instead rotating among so many different brands of obliqueness, patterns of non-sequitur and impediments to the truth – or, alternatively, mouthpieces for the truth that are so horrific that Doc has to erect his own impediments, converse with them out of the corner of his eye. As a result, the film is something of a study in how to impede and fragment conversation with free indirect speech in the manner that Pynchon has made his own, with virtually every encounter interrupted, mediated, redirected, warped or distracted in some way, and dialogue gradually dissociated from reaction shots until it plays like some late refracted tribute to the great Zucker comedies. Even when Anderson occasionally chooses to include both participants in the frame, it still feels as if the camera is gradually zooming in on Doc, just as Doc always seems at the edge of the shot when he’s not in it, grunting, mumbling or making some kind of other noise or movement that sets everything awry. In the process, Anderson doesn’t recreate so much as relax into the 70s, poising the onset of the new decade at that pre-hallucintaory state he does so well, those first few moments when you start to wonder whether or not you might be on the verge of seeing things, until it feels like getting high is simply a matter of relaxing enough, while having a bad trip is simply a matter of relaxing too much. As with Pynchon's novel, the more languorous and laid-back the film becomes, the more open and receptive it feels to the paranoia that gathers around the dialogue, building towards some inconceivable vision even as we slip further and further into a state of total relaxation, too much relaxation – a vision that feels as if it might come closest to disclosing itself on the few occasions when Doc ventures out into the blinding SoCal sun, whose soft haze floods the screen like a drug that’s about to psychoactivate. But it never really does, or never fully does, and while that might feel anticlimactic, it’s astonishingly true to Pynchon’s most lyrical moments, which by their very definition tend to be anticlimactic – moments when the conspiracy fails to come full circle, when even the most sublime paratactic edifices collapse and crumble into single sentences under the weight of their own yearning “for the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.”