Director: Alex Ross Perry
Runtime: 90 minutes
There is an art to filming conversations between character, and it's one that is often ignored. Have two people on screen talking? Then just cut between closeups and mid-shots as each person speaks, with the occasional excursion to a wide shot to let you know that both actors actually shared space together on set. Hell, if there's some drama going on behind the scenes, you can just pretend that two actors were actually on screen together (paging The Good Wife).
Yet for director Alex Ross Perry, whose films never contain much in the way of visual flash, the handling of conversations is of the utmost importance. This is just a small, but crucial, part of why his latest film, psychological drama Queen of Earth, succeeds so well. Though there are scenes that employ the well-tread shot-reverse-shot method, Perry also showcases a flair for framing the ordinary in unexpected ways. In one early scene, as tragedy-stricken Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) and successful Virginia (Katherine Waterston) chat, Perry allows the focus to wander. The entire scene takes place in one shot, and shifts from holding on the speaker to the listener. Some of the most important bits of acting take place as performers listen and react to their co-stars, and Perry utilizes this notion to great effect.
There is also the matter of the nature of the conversation(s), and Queen of Earth has a knack for slyly ratcheting up the emotional tension without fully playing its hand. Which is good, seeing as this is the sort of psycho-drama that's heavy on people walking through rooms and talking, and light on external plot developments. Since it's long past due that I actually lay out of the story's foundation, it's this: best friends Catherine and Virginia take a vacation at the latter's (well, her parents') rural lake house after the former's life is turned upside down.
As we learn in the opening scene, a claustrophobic closeup on Moss' tear-stained face, Catherine's father has just died, which has prompted her boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley) to finally end their relationship (timing isn't his strong suit). Catherine is distraught, for reasons that go beyond the obvious. Virginia, meanwhile, is tasked with being the supporting BFF and emotional caretaker. Despite the placid water by the lake house, the friends' retreat is anything but smooth sailing.
In these two roles, Mr. Perry has created two difficult personalities that are at once off-putting and fascinating. Perry's films have never gone out of their way to make characters likable, and that certainly hasn't changed now. But underneath these thorny exteriors lies the rich psychological substance that drives Queen of Earth from petty squabbling to acid-soaked monologues. If Bergman and Polanski had co-directed the beach house episode of Girls (and/or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), they would have come up with something like Perry's latest.
Most intriguing is how Perry avoids giving out obvious answers. Catherine and Virginia may be friends, but they have funny ways of showing it. They often trade emotional places as well, at times blurring the line between each other (much like Bergman's Persona). That's precisely where the above-mentioned conversation scenes come into play. Closeups are - obviously - used to highlight an actor's face, but in Queen of Earth they also play a big part in erasing the weakening border that exists between the two leads. As we see in flashbacks, Catherine and Virginia were once in each others' shoes, and the smartly composed shots of them together subtly reinforce the idea that their emotional states are sliding up and down along an unsettling spectrum. Even when the women are separated, Perry finds ways of connecting their bodies (or minds), such as when he dissolves from a shot of Virginia jogging to Catherine sluggishly making her way down a staircase.
Whether sharing Perry and cinematographer Sean P. Williams' compositions or not, both leads deliver standout performances as well. Waterston, who only came into the spotlight in last year's Inherent Vice, owns the first half of the film. The caretaker role can become redundant, yet the actress keeps Virginia full of surprises. You expect her to react to a situation one way, given previous examples, and then she does the opposite. Perry also gives the actress quite a bit of room to delve into the character in the thoughtfully-chosen flashbacks, which are informative rather than disruptive. Past and present run together much like Catherine and Virginia, reinforcing the creeping notion that we're all just a few degrees away from either triumph or a meltdown.
With Waterston (mostly) acting as the emotional anchor of the piece, Moss is free to really let loose, and she does so spectacularly. She and Perry take quite a bit of time to wind up Catherine after the opening sob fest, forgoing the urge to fill the role with nothing but melodramatic outbursts. Catherine's unravelling is a slow motion spectacle of mental collapse, doled out in bits and pieces. Moss makes acrobatic leaps from bitterness to anger to tears to unhinged laughter, and lands them all with eerie plausibility. Despite the creepy score that gently pushes the story along, Queen of Earth is sincere in its treatment of mental instability, even though it often has an acerbic way of showing it.
Perceptions of the characters and their actions change at every turn, and to watch the actors, but especially Moss, trace it all on their faces is both elegant and grotesque. Restraint is a powerful tool, and it's impressive how Perry and co. use it even when characters' psyches start fraying at the edges. When Catherine unleashes a torrent of invective on Virginia's smarmy boyfriend (Patrick Fugit), it's all the more frightening because of how quiet she keeps her voice, even though we know that there's a hurricane of bile built up inside. Rather than assault the character (and audience) with an explosion, Perry and Moss opt for a slow poisoning, ensuring that the side effects will linger under your skin and in your head for far longer.
Grade: A-
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Runtime: 145 minutes
Finding the right writer/director to adapt a distinctive novel is no easy task. When directors apply too much of their own vision, the original text gets lost in the shuffle (though The Shining is still an example of how such an approach can work). And if the director is too safe, the source material ends up being worshipped as gospel, often resulting in sluggish, line-by-line adaptations that fail to leap from the page to the screen. Perfect marriages of director and source material, those that complement each other rather than engage in a stylistic tug of war, are rare, but not impossible. The Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men set a high standard seven years ago, and in October David Fincher's Gone Girl joined its ranks. The latest adaptation to work so well, even if it's not quite great, is Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice.
It's understandable that it's taken so long for a Pynchon adaptation to reach cinemas. The reclusive author's works are characterized by dense, head-spinning prose wrapped around byzantine plots. Inherent Vice, as a novel, isn't as overwhelming as something like "Gravity's Rainbow," however, which makes it a smarter pick for a silver screen debut. In Anderson, Pynchon's novel has found an artist perfectly adapting to its pot-smoke flooded atmosphere and shaggy dog storytelling.
Set right at the end of the 60s, Inherent Vice, like the novel, wastes no time in getting started. The instant drug-fueled detective Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) wakes up, he's confronted by his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston), who's come to beg for help in the dead of night. Shasta's new boyfriend, land development millionaire Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) is in danger of being thrown in a psych ward so that his wife and her lover can claim his fortune. It's a classic noir opening, albeit dressed up in 60s threads and surrounded by LA surf culture and neon lights instead of venetian blinds.
But it's not long after this encounter that Doc finds himself in way over his head and the plot starts to snowball into a web of alliances, double crosses, and conspiracies. People show up out of the blue with cryptic warnings, and somehow everyone he meets, no matter how different, is somehow connected. Everyone, good, bad, or in between, has an agenda except for Doc, who wanders through the story like a confused extra rather than a true protagonist. If you come into Inherent Vice expecting answers to all of your questions, you're out of luck. Doc barely understands everything going on, and Anderson keeps the film rooted in his perspective. There are so many angles in Vice's story that it can be dizzying to keep them all together.
Even so, Anderson's ability to capture the tone of Pynchon's overall story as well as his prose is commendable. Clocking in at two and a half hours, it's quite the long trip down the marijuana-scented rabbit hole, but the contact high Inherent Vice provides is often a pleasurable one. Though often quite funny, there's a pointed commentary on display about how those in power co-opt counterculture movements that gives the film just enough of a point to justify its narrative ramblings.
Though Phoenix is the story's only true main character (everyone else drifts in and out of the story at a moment's notice), it's the massive supporting cast that really owns Vice. Josh Brolin is an early standout as Lt. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, a straight-laced cop who enjoys nothing more than making Doc's "hippie bullshit" life hell. His interactions with Doc bring out the film's off-kilter humor in both dialogue exchanges and weird visual gags. Waterston is an effectively alluring and conflicted surfer femme fatale, and makes her relationship with the considerably older Mr. Phoenix believable. Though underused, Benicio Del Toro is spot on as Doc's lawyer, while Owen Wilson and Jena Malone turn in memorable work as a missing musician and his wife, respectively. A somewhat unrecognizable Eric Roberts is also quite good as the missing Mickey Wolfmann, once the character finally surfaces.
Despite the characters who pop up across the entire film, the most memorable performance comes from one of the story's one-off characters. As a corrupt, drug-addled dentist, Martin Short delivers an arrestingly gonzo performance that marks Inherent Vice's comedic high point. To see his character leave the story so quickly is a bit of a disappointment. Other characters have plenty of spark to contrast with Doc's mellow attitude, but the dynamism Short brings to the film is often missed during other key scenes.
Perplexingly, the cast member who is least consistent is Phoenix. Though his look and mannerisms are spot on, the actor's delivery is wildly inconsistent. Even when his face is glazed over, there's a sharpness to Phoenix's eyes and features that never quite sinks into Doc's mindset. Similarly to his work in The Immigrant, Phoenix sometimes just feels too tightly wound and modern to fully immerse himself in Doc, who's the epitomization of a very specific subculture and time period. Phoenix certainly has his moments in the role, but just when he appears to have fully clicked with the character, some piece of dialogue or interaction comes along and rings false.
Phoenix may be inconsistent, but at least the storytelling and tone are set on the right path. Anderson holds keeps the pieces of the story together, at times just barely, ensuring that enough of it makes sense while leaving plenty of connections skimmed over to the point where the film practically demands a second viewing. Anderson's longtime cinematographer Robert Elswit allows certain images to look grainy or rough, further drawing one into the story's representation late 60's Los Angeles. Composer Jonny Greenwood contributes a moody, accessible score that nicely contrasts with the purposefully eerie themes written for Anderson's previous two films (There Will Be Blood & The Master). Other production details are excellent across the board, though special mention should be given to the hair and makeup team for putting so much personality in each character's coiffure.
Though Inherent Vice's longwinded structure can lead to sporadic lulls in pacing, it's still an engaging trip through the mind of one of the most important writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Vice is not regarded as one of Pynchon's greatest works, and the film isn't one of Anderson's finest, but both work as engrossing pieces of entertainment that finely straddle the lines between high and low culture. It's proof that one can create a perfectly successful and satisfying adaptation of a novel without straining to find a hidden greatness that was probably never there in the first place. And even if it was, it would probably just go up in smoke anyway.
Grade: B
