Thomas Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson are a match made in filmmaking heaven. Both work on sprawling canvasses with large cohorts of quirky, well-defined characters. Both have used Los Angeles as a setting, and both know its cultural landscape like the backs of their hands.
There's a reason why nobody has made a film adaptation of a Pynchon novel until now. Inherent Vice is one of his shorter, more accessible works, but no less creative, incisive or dense than his longer novels. (If anyone wanted to film V, or Gravity's Rainbow, or Mason and Dixon, a mini-series on HBO lasting 20 or 30 hours would probably be the appropriate format these days. His other short novel, The Crying of Lot 49, would be a great follow-up to this film; another tall tale set in the hills and valleys of Southern California, taking in the defense industry, the police, DaVinci code type machinations decades before The Da Vinci Code, and the entertainment machine.)
Here, Joaquin Phoenix has to carry the entire film on his stoned, hairy shoulders, and he does not disappoint. Perhaps too easy a comparison, but Jeff Bridges as The Dude in the Big Lebowski just kept popping into my mind. His Doc Sportello has the distinct advantage in his profession of being constantly underestimated by the goons and crooks around him. Josh Brolin as failed actor, LAPD outcast and flatopped frenemy Bigfoot just can't seem to crush Sportello under his giant shoe.
So many other great performers populate this film that come and go in a flash. I wanted to see a lot of more of Marty Short, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro and Eric Roberts. But leaving the audience wanting more is always a much better stance than the characters overstaying their welcome.
To those who complain about there being too little plot, or even, no plot at all, I must say, you didn't really get it. There is a Hero's Journey here. Doc is given a mission, and does go on a quest of Odyssean proportions. On this Journey, he encounters all kinds of monsters and discovers the failures of Hippie idealism, the triumph of cynical capitalism and the destructive exploitation of the naive in the post-Manson, pre-Watergate early 1970's. But he survives, coming out the other side with his humanity intact, based on what he does for Coy Harlingen.
What exactly did he do? No spoilers here, other than to say that after it was all over, I was highly satisfied, even if a few story threads were left hanging.
If you're a Pynchon fan, I would anticipate that you would enjoy this, with possibly a few small objections, but overall this is a fantastic piece of film making based on a sublime piece of writing.
