Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
A secondary viewing of most films will confirm near enough one's general feeling about them. Inherent Vice is no exception to this general rule. On my first viewing I gave a lukewarm response, owing mainly to the liberal cuts made to the plot of the source novel by Thomas Pynchon, which I had read some months before the film's theatrical release and loved. It was my opinion then that it was not a good adaptation, which is about as kind as I could hope to be to any attempt from any director to turn the prose of one of America and the world's greatest writers of fiction into a visual language. The thing with a Pynchon novel is that for all its mystery, unanswered questions, deep unidentified longing, and zany humour, there is never a moment that the prose becomes ponderous, ill fitting, devoid of lucidity and flow, alienating to the reader, even when found in its strangest, wildest, most impenetrable habitats. Inherent Vice the novel is not among his most complicated of plot, dense in subject matter, or broad in scope, its action takes place in a relatively small enclosed geographical space, and is played out by a paucity of characters in comparison with most of his books, yet even this most graciously straightforward offering proves to be too much for the big screen to handle. The cuts which so abhorred me on first viewing were not so much an issue on the second, budget must be taken into consideration, and no one could do a direct translation of pinecone scratchings into celluloid without a figure well into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and yet I can still only extend my respect to Paul Thomas Anderson for having the guts to take on Pynchon and fail, for it is not within me to call this a good adaptation. So much of what makes the novel work is in the prose, here lost to visual references which, unless viewing the piece as a frame by frame still gallery, are likewise lost to the rushing current of a film trying to fit everything into a tight temporal framework.
But the real question is not whether Inherent Vice is a good adaptation, no sane Pynchon fan (there are a couple out there, somewhere, I'm sure) would expect any one of his novels to work well on screen, but is it a good film? My answer to that question is: yes, mostly. I can fall into neither one of the camps of love and hate that make up its present status in the pop culture, nor can I walk the middle road of apathy, because I like this film, mostly. “Mostly” is the crux of the issue. A few bum notes ring hard through the film's hazy beach mélange: great-reading, sloppy-speaking novelesque dialogue peeks out from behind naturalistic doper talk, as if the actors are on a pivot between two extremes, that of exhaling clouds of mumbled but with attentive listening coherent phonemes, and that of verbatim enunciating with great exactitude a sentence from page one-hundred-something — the script or the speaker's fault, who can say? Sudden bouts of expository verbal diarrhoea, more than tangentially related to the prior concern, while contained in an odourless fashion, trip up the pacing of the film in ways avoided on the page, interspersed with jokes timed to obscure rhythms that sometimes hit their mark, sometimes don't, like everyone's phasing in and out of each other's conversational space at all times, occasionally snapping back into awareness and pausing like emerging from a deep meditative apnea. The sum effect, not as one might assume the engendering in the viewer a feeling of being stoned, but of being taken outside and asked to watch voyeur-like through the window. Inherent Vice is a film whose flaws keep it at a distance, very slight, and occasionally hard to put your finger on, but there and distracting.
So what are we saying here, it's a good film that isn't all that good? Well, no, it's just that what's bad about it tends to be in the foreground, while what's good about it, though by far the majority of its contents, is often glanced at an angle, in the distance, through dense fog. I sense an attempt, somewhere in there, to make up for the missing pieces of the source material by embodying the nature of the source author, to always be hinting, suggesting at the moreness of what's out there, but Anderson as a director is simply not there yet, still a journeyman in the adaptation trade, but with an ambition that demands respect and admiration, for I dare say no one could have done a better job.