![]() ![]() Most of the women serve to demonstrate that free spirits can easily become lost souls in this anything-goes world.Īs the audience’s would-be tour guide through this haphazardly mapped landscape, Doc Sportello is something of a wayward knight, a clown prince, a solitary jouster for personal justice who, though he’s often in a fog, somehow manages to see straight. Blatnoyd, a drug-happy horndog of the first order, and many of the guests who go to hide or dry out at a loony new-age retreat. Brolin’s hard-boiled and hardcore Bigfoot is perhaps the most prominent of these bizarre creations intimidating one moment and provocatively sucking on a chocolate-covered banana the next, the man is clearly deranged, although not without great cunning. Threeply and Adrian Prussia, just for starters. Tubeside, Sauncho Smilax, Petunia Leeway, Puck Beaverton, Dr. ![]() The Nabokovian names Pynchon bestowed upon many of his characters suggest the broadly comic context he’s created for them: Dr. In this regard, Inherent Vice is intermittently successful but only up to a point. Read more Joaquin Phoenix Won’t Star in ‘Doctor Strange’ This means that what really counts here, as in a head-scratching classic like The Big Sleep, is the sizzle of individual scenes, the atmosphere, the innuendo, the electricity between the characters and actors. Still, viewers coming to this material cold will find it pretty daunting to connect all the dots. Looming over everything is a mysterious schooner, the Golden Fang, the provenance and cargo of which is much speculated about.Īdapting a book for the second time in his career (after There Will Be Blood), Anderson has contrived to cook Pynchon’s sprawling yarn down to its dramatic essence, even if some wonderful interludes, such as a side trip to Vegas, are sorely missed. When he heads out to Channel View Estates, Wolfmann’s latest eyesore housing development in the South Bay, and pops into a sex parlor there looking for one of the owner’s bodyguards, an Aryan Brotherhood biker, Doc is knocked out, only to wake up next to the dead biker and be accused of murder by buzz-cut cop Bigfoot Bjornsen ( Josh Brolin), an old nemesis who walks and talks like he just stepped off the set of a lewd version of Dragnet (he actually does extra work on Adam-12).ĭoc wriggles out of this absurdity but becomes pressed by both Bigfoot and the FBI to help locate Wolfmann and counterculture figures he’s suspected of knowing, among them Coy Harlington ( Owen Wilson), a musician friend who is thought to have died but rematerializes in the weirdest places. ![]() Wolfmann’s disappearance is merely the trip-wire for all sorts of other, mostly disreputable characters to bisect Doc’s orbit, not a few of them with some sort of connection to Wolfmann. Where we might expect to hear voiceover narration from Doc himself to help clarify the action and vast cast of characters, instead there is rather baffling commentary from a secondary female character who imparts confidential information and insight even by the end of the film, it’s impossible to figure how she’s privy to it. Through the miasma of dope smoke and spiritual malaise shuffles Doc Sportello ( Joaquin Phoenix), who at his beachfront pad in Gordita Beach is surprised to behold Shasta Fay Hepworth ( Katherine Waterston), a beautiful butterfly from his past who shows up to ask his professional help in tracking down her secret lover, big-shot land developer Mickey Wolfmann, who’s vanished. Read more Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Inherent Vice’ to Premiere at New York Film Festival The themes of civic corruption and big-money influence and everyone having their price are unchanged since Philip Marlowe took them on several generations back, but providing this updated tale with its special pungency is the immediacy of lost innocence what was beautiful and groovy and far out up to 1969 all went south in the wake of the Manson murders, on top of which you had Richard Nixon as Southern California’s fresh gift to the nation. Set in 1970, the year Anderson was born, Pynchon’s book is a Day-Glo doper variation on Raymond Chandler, cut with James Ellroy and Robert Towne, about a stoned white knight who can navigate the city’s power structure from top to bottom and deal with all the freaks because he’s one of them. ![]()
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