Review: "Inherent Vice"

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

Review: "Midnight in Paris"

When one has made as many films as Woody Allen has (40), it's easy to feel that the work is becoming repetitive. As one of the most prolific auteurs ever, Allen has had his shares of triumphs and failures. And yet he's always pressed ahead, never taking too long between films. Starting in the mid-2000s, Allen hit something of a turnaround, leaving his beloved New York to write love letters to the great metropolises of Europe. It hasn't been without setbacks (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), but Europe seems to suit Allen well, as evidenced by works like Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and now, Midnight in Paris.

First, a moment of honesty. When I first saw the trailer, I actually feared for the worst. All I got was that a man takes walks around Paris at midnight and "finds himself," and that everything else seemed rather, well, stupid. When Allen is on fire, he's fantastic, but when he's not, he can be horribly tedious, and I feared for the worst with this film. But the secret to Midnight in Paris that makes it work turns about to be those midnight sequences, which the trailer couldn't have done more to misrepresent.

After a picturesque opening montage of the city of light (one that could have used some trimming), we're introduced to American writer Gil (Owen Wilson) and his fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams). Gil is, to put it lightly, in love with Paris. Inez? Not so much. He's a romantic who loves the idea of Paris in the 1920s, she's convinced that he's suffering from what the pedantic Paul (Michael Sheen) calls "Golden Age syndrome." One night, trying to get a break from Paul's pseudo-intellectualism and Inez's condescending right-wing parents, Gil gets lost wandering around the city, and finds himself (literally) transported to the Paris of his dreams.

And it's here, in those midnight sequences that the trailer(s) refused to spoil, that the magic kicks in. Gil begins fraternizing with everyone from the Fitzgeralds (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) to Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), and even receives writing advice from Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). These encounters, whether one-hit wonders or repeated, are charming, surprising, and at times hilarious. While there he also encounters the (fictional) Adriana (Marion Cotillard), part-time lover of Picasso and Hemingway. What initially starts as a charming relationship soon evolves into a microcosm of the film's central idea: that people always long for an idealized version of the past. For Gil, a man of the 2000s, it's the 1920s, but for Adriana, it's the Paris of the Belle Epoch. So even though Midnight in Paris is a love letter to Paris, it has the smarts to not go overboard in its idealizing of the past, reminding us that we can still enjoy the works of the past in the present.

However, like the Paris of Gil's fantasies, Allen's latest does have its share of problems, even if they often get buried under film's infectious charm. As fun and surprising as the historical cameos are, there are times when Allen's film falls prey to name-dropping for the sake of name-dropping, with plenty of luminary figures not even getting more than a few seconds of screen time. Meanwhile, in the present, Michael Sheen's Paul, though used to great effect, vanishes after a certain point, often-mentioned but suddenly never heard from again. Allen also throws in a rather pointless scene involving missing jewelry, one that comes dangerously close to evoking his writing at its worst: drawn-out, tedious, and not even remotely amusing. And as a work of story-telling, Midnight actually feels like a half step down from Vicky Cristina Barcelona, despite lacking that film's irritating omniscient narrator.

Thankfully, Allen has assembled an ensemble that makes even the film's weakest moments go down smoothly. The bigger cameos, like Hiddleston and Pill, or Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway, are true delights. Brody's Dali, however, is perhaps the best, in a one-scene role wherein he proposes to Gil that he paint him like rhino with a melting mouth. As the film's lone fictional blast from the past, Marion Cotillard brings a lovely presence to Adriana, even if the role feels almost too basic. Her chemistry with Wilson really works, and it's almost a shame that Allen wraps up their arc so quickly, instead of really exploring their gradually diverging views on the past. Back in the present, Rachel McAdams is saddled with a rather one-note role, which she handles adequately. More entertaining are her parents (Kurt Fuller and In the Loop's Mimi Kennedy), wealthy Tea Party-supporters who begin to grow suspicious of Gil's recurring midnight strolls. The show, however, belongs to Wilson. A California-ized version of the Woody Allen persona, Wilson's odd charm meshes perfectly with Gil's (and thereby Allen's) sensibilities, showing us that New York isn't the only city home to sensitive neurotic writers.

Midnight in Paris may not rank among Allen's finest, and it may have its share of flaws, but there's certainly a lot to love. The cast is game, the script is light and funny, and at a clean 90 minutes, it's the sort of small fantasy that you wish would go on for another 20 or 30 minutes. Allen's conclusion, that we can still enjoy the past in our own present, isn't executed with much depth or emotional resonance, yet it still works as a frothy love letter to one of the world's great cities thanks to its wit and irresistible charm. For a director now 40 films in, Midnight in Paris is proof that age has yet to rob Allen of his capacity to create thoroughly delightful cinema, regardless of whether or not you find it somewhat minor.

Grade: B

A few points on "How Do You Know?"

• I really hate this type of romantic comedy. The awkwardly put together empty scenes, the obnoxious stalling of the inevitable ending, the painfully dragged out comic relief from a random supporting character, etc...
• This is hands down the worst character of Reese Witherspoon's career. She's unbearable, and her need to vocalize canned motivational/inspirational sayings is painful.
• Paul Rudd is the only thing worth a damn in this movie, and he's the only person who ever generates a decent laugh.
• Jack Nicholson and Owen Wilson are completely wasted.
• The script is as indecisive as Witherspoon's character. It's also equally insufferable.
• This was written by the same man who gave us Broadcast News. That's just tragic.

Grade: D-/F