Warner Brothers, 2014. 159 minutes
Movie Review
By Michael F. Duggan
“Was it possible that at every gathering, concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in here, up North, back East, wherever, some dark crews had been busy all along reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear? ‘Gee,’ he thought, ‘I don’t know.’”
-Sortilege (narrator)
“Sometimes it’s just about doing the right thing.”
-Lt. Detective Christian “Big Foot” Bjornson
How is it possible that this film lost money at the box office?
In college I was assigned either The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity’s Rainbow, but I don’t think I read either. Friends who did read Thomas Pynchon either stood in awe of him as a Napoleonic figure of contemporary literature (even Gore Vidal seemed to walk a little softly around him in his reviews), or else saw his work as lacking coherence and believed that his V was inferior to, say, Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch.
I recently watched the movie version of his out-of-character 2009 novel, Inherent Vice, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and am still trying to sort it all out. It is a mystery that takes place in Southern California in 1970 when the dream of the 1960s is devolving into gonzo, sleaze, and paranoia (think Hunter S. Thompson, the LAPD, outlaw bikers, Nixon’s FBI, Altamont, the Manson family, etc.).
The story revolves around doper Gordita (real life Manhattan) Beach psychiatrist and private detective, Larry “Doc” Sportello, played sympathetically and with wonderful deadpan by Joaquin Phoenix. It combines a good, if tongue-in-cheek—frequently silly—feel for Southern California during the final days of the Age of Aquarius with a parody nod/tribute to older noir detective novels/films (complete with a hippie girl astrologer as narrator). With this sleeper’s impressive star power it is baffling that it went mostly unnoticed. A hair’s breadth under two-and-a-half hours, it feels a little long, and yet I can’t think of what I would have cut or tightened-up. Like a Kubrick film, it creates a world in itself with its own feel. It has a judiciously-selected soundtrack, the cinematography is superb, and although mysteries are not my usual fare, I liked it a lot.
Supposedly the lead was offered to Robert Downey Jr., and watching it, one can only imagine (to the point of distraction) what he could have done with the part. That said, and although Downey may be a genius at playing brilliant-but-flawed characters, I like him least when he plays straight-up California. It might have worked magnificently, but I am glad Phoenix got the part and it is hard to imagine Downey playing it better.
Other impressive performances are delivered by Josh Brolin as hard-ass police detective, Christian F. “Big Foot” Bjornsen, Katherine Waterston as careless hippie chick and Sportello’s ex, Shasta Fay Hepworth, Owen Wilson as wayward surf music sax legend, former heroin addict, and reluctant government snitch, Coy Harlingen, Martin Short as a cartoonish dentist working as a transparent front for a drug cartel, and a constellation of memorable minor roles (including Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, and Boardwalk Empire veteran, Michael K. Williams).
The plot is too involved to go over (one of the film’s few shortcoming along with its considerable running time). Suffice it to say that it involves the disappearance of a billionaire land developer Michael “Mickie” Wolfmann, a Southeast Asian drug cartel, and the mysterious reappearance of a lost love. The three trailers are cut to make it seem like at least two different films.1
Unless you intend to watch it two or three times and keep an elaborate flowchart of characters and organizations, don’t rack your brain trying to follow all of the twists and turns of the main plot, the strands of characters and leads weaving in an out of the story. Just let it flow over you with a general awareness of the action. In the end, the film works as a morality tale disguised as an overly intricate period farce. What Catch 22 is to WWII, Inherent Vice is to California of 1970. And like Heller’s novel, this story—ostensibly a mystery with a convoluted plot—is much simpler and more profound than it appears at face value.
Alfred Kazin observes that Catch 22 is a depiction of the corruption of war, an accretion of absurdity and farce around a small core of stark existential terror—of the horror of violent death in war.2 Don’t let the comedic wallows in the Southern Cal drug and sex cultures of a half-century ago—the caricatures of dopers, crew-cut LAPD thugs, FBI suits, outlaw bikers with swastika facial tattoos, and adorable hippie women-children—fool you. The film, in my opinion, and in spite of its trappings (and without giving away too much of the ending), is about simple decency and what “nag(s) at you in the middle of the night,” the possibility of redemption in a dark Manichaean world, and a lost love redeemed.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZfs22E7JmI&t=63s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fURVDOgwL60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTRMkQzFYHI
- Recounted by Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 34-35.