Inherent Vice review: Thomas Pynchon’s own mother wouldn’t recognise it

We silently await an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now, at least not in terms or profile or cast.

Yes, we have no Pynchon adaptation.

We do, however, have Impolex (2009), Alex Ross Perry's small, lovely riff on Gravity's Rainbow; Donatello and Fosco Dubini's documentary A Journey Into the Film of P; and now Paul Thomas Anderson's illustrated guide to Inherent Vice, one of the author's Later Easier Ones.

A screaming, alas, does not quite come across the sky. Pynchon’s writing, like Pynchon’s America, is something that one allows to happen, or unfurl. One falls into it and emerges, clean, knowing that the only knowing is not knowing. The correct answer is one. The correct answer is also zero.

The author’s work, we are told, is too dense, too cryptic, too postmodern, too cerebral, too encyclopaedic, to exist in the same dimensional space as a movie.

But having decided long ago that no situation has any objective reality, we’re more than willing to entertain Paul Thomas Anderson’s attempts to stencilise the master into celluloid form.

As a standalone film, PTA's projection at the planetarium simply doesn't work. Inherent Vice, a comparatively accessible stoner gumshoe story, still contains too many characters and subplots and meanderings and pop culture diversions to wholly translate into the medium of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

At the heart of Anderson’s bong goodbye to counterculture, we find Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc Sportello. It’s 1970 and Doc is looking for his missing ex-girlfriend, Shasta (Katherine Waterston). Or possibly a drug cartel run by dentists. Or a Jewish member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Or a dead or not dead saxophone player (Owen Wilson). Or a mysterious outfit called the Golden Fang.

Doc’s diverging then converging then diverging again investigations are sometimes aided by his deputy DA girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon) and a lawyer (Benecio Del Toro). More often, they are hindered by his arch-nemesis, the hippy-hating jackboot Detective Christian F “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), named for “his entry method of choice”.

Working with his regular DOP Robert Elswit, Anderson translates the sprawl of characters and occurrences into wilfully uncinematic spectacle. Every scene is shot so closely that the frame cuts out characters and cuts off heads, only for the camera to slowly move even closer to its subject.

And Pynchon's just not here, man. Barring a fun appearance by Martin Short, there is little or none of the author's zany, zippy energy. Instead, the film approximates the airless conditions of the hothouse recorded in his short story Entropy, but with no one to break the windows.

Zero and one. Flip flop. As a standalone film, PTA’s projection at the planetarium does work. Joanna Newson’s narrator, who is frequently to be found in the frame, preserves the book’s climbing, intricate sentences. Phoenix and Brolin invariably make for some magical ideological head-butting. Their two-step does much to convey the source novel’s impending sense of cultural doom. Anderson and Elswit find gloom in California’s sunshine and recidivism in its futuristic designs.

How will this play in the non-Pynchon community? Not at all, sez us. But for the converted or the plain curious, it’s something to see, if not cherish.

For now, we silently await an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel. Is there an architecturally specialised choreographer in the house?