If only Paul Thomas Anderson could remember what drew him to the story of “Inherent Vice” in the first place. Or, more specifically, by making a movie of cultural confusion, spiritual uncertainty and overall disorientation set in 1970 — perhaps not coincidentally the year Anderson was born — is he looking to say something about right now?
“I’m still not sure of the answer to that even having done it,” Anderson said recently.
“Inherent Vice” is a shaggy dog underdog story, the tale of Larry “Doc” Sportello, a hippie detective sent on a vague mission in and around Los Angeles by an ex-girlfriend who broke his heart. Loose and funny, the movie’s flaky fog is cut through by a sharp edge of sadness and loss — the feeling that something good is over and is not coming back.
In his investigation, Doc (played with tones of weary, frayed hopefulness by Joaquin Phoenix) repeatedly comes in contact with the Golden Fang, a multipurpose shadow organization with interests that include international drug trafficking and Southland dentistry.
“Let me put it this way, the Golden Fang is still in business,” Anderson comes around to saying. “And they’ve always been in business. And I don’t see them getting out of business any time soon. Which is a drag, but maybe that’s just the way that it is.”
In a passage from the Thomas Pynchon novel not in the movie — “Believe me, I’ll have many sleepless nights about what’s not in this film,” Anderson said — Doc is described as “caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness.”
Anderson is a writer, director, producer and five-time Oscar nominee who has gone from young prodigy of overwhelming promise to idiosyncratic maker of films with visionary sweep and exploratory expansiveness. Opening Dec. 12 after a high-profile premiere at the recent New York Film Festival, “Inherent Vice” arrives with an additional air of anticipation and expectation for being the first major screen adaptation of a novel by the celebrated, notoriously private author. It’s funny, in the dual sense of being both a comedy and also deeply weird.
“Inherent Vice” lines up chronologically with Anderson’s previous two films to create something of an extended survey of power and masculinity in the American 20th century with a special focus on the mythologies of Southern California. After the economic and geographic expansion of 2007’s “There Will Be Blood” and inward-looking tug-of-war between the mind and the spirit in 2012’s “The Master,” Anderson has gone really far out.
Anderson humors a theory that Doc is Freddie Quell (the rascal vagabond played by Phoenix in “The Master”) a few drifting years down the line, countering with his own notion that Freddie might have started up something akin to L.A.’s utopian commune the Source Family. There is something in Doc that just wants to help, even when doing so is not what’s best for him.
“He’s on the case. And I don’t know if he knows what the case is, but he’s on it,” explained Anderson. “So he’s a puppy dog and a pit bull together. I like that a lot. I think he’s desperate to find out what went wrong, not just with his own love life but with his country.”
An L.A. story
A native of Los Angeles, where he lives with actress Maya Rudolph and their four children, Anderson bounds between a bouncy, youthful energy and a thoughtful, controlled stillness. With a grown-out mop of hair he sometimes presses back behind his ears with both hands, he has a sandy scruff on his face that looks like he forgot to shave for so long he woke up one day with a beard.
Set in the fictional South Bay surf shack community of Gordita Beach, the story of “Inherent Vice” begins when Doc is paid a surprise visit by a former flame, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), in need of help. This sets him off on a wayward course throughout Los Angeles, intersecting with real estate developers, the FBI, political militants, local cops, groovy masseuses, ominous therapists and the ever-evolving presence of the Golden Fang.
The structure of Doc’s investigation is such that the movie is stocked with an elastic, ever-surprising cast that includes Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Benicio Del Toro, Eric Roberts, Maya Rudolph, Michael Kenneth Williams, Jena Malone, Jeannie Berlin, Martin Donovan and Martin Short.
“Eggs break, chocolate melts, glass shatters” is how Doc’s lawyer explains the legal term that gives the film and the book its title, the defect that causes something’s demise. And much like in “The Big Sleep” or “The Big Lebowski,” the actual details in the story of what becomes of who may end up a bit fuzzy as the initial mystery is solved but also somewhat thrown aside.
“Trying to make the movie feel how the book made me feel, or how Pynchon in general made me feel, there are many times where I feel lost, but never in a bad way,” Anderson said. “If I’m participating with the book on its terms and it’s not giving me what I want it to give me, then maybe that’s on me. Maybe I just need to giggle and give in a little bit.
“It’s like getting high and being nervous about it,” he instructed. “Just enjoy the high. Just sit back and relax. Don’t freak out.”
The film is an extension of the working methods Anderson has employed since 2002’s “Punch-Drunk Love,” a mix of preparation and spontaneity. Shot in summer 2013 all around Greater Los Angeles for around $20 million, the film’s look, alternately inky dark and sun-bleached faded, was created on 35 mm film by cinematographer Robert Elswit (who won an Oscar for his work on “There Will Be Blood”), with a lurking score composed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.
‘No turning back’
Anderson first considered adapting Pynchon’s “Vineland” or “Mason & Dixon” before the book “Inherent Vice” was released in 2009. At first he wasn’t sure if he wanted to make another period story set in California, concerned over retreading ground from his 1970s-80s exploration in “Boogie Nights” or coming too close to the world of Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye.” But almost as if the story had begun to exert a power of its own, he found himself propping up the novel with a cookbook holder and typing it out line by line into the form of a screenplay.
“The next thing you know, you’re in love with the characters and it’s got its hooks in you, and there’s no turning back,” he said.
