Category: review

Let’s get this out of the way right now: I love Inherent Vice. The novel, I mean. I’ve read it at least six times at this point…possibly more. It’s by no means my favorite Pynchon, but when it was announced that for the first time ever the reclusive author allowed someone to adapt one of his works, I had to admit this was a good choice.

Inherent Vice, the novel, has a clear beginning, a clear ending, and a relatively clear journey between those terminal points. That’s more than you could say for almost anything else the man’s ever written. The fact that it also has a relatively small roster of important characters (again…a Pynchon rarity) and relies heavily on overt comedy makes it seem like the perfect Pynchon to bring to the screen.

I’ve now seen the film. In fact, I saw it with Paul Thomas Anderson in attendance, as he graced the humble Denver branch of the Alamo Drafthouse with his presence. I thought he might provide some insight into the film, or at least give me something that would make for a good story.

Instead he stood up to speak before the film, mumbled what sounded like a flat joke at the theater owner’s expense, and then seemed to lose all confidence. He interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence and said something to the effect of, “I don’t feel like talking. Let’s just watch the movie.”

Nervous laughter. Some shuffling. But, yeah, he was gone. I thought he made his way back to his seat, but when the houselights came up at the end of the film he wasn’t there, so I have no idea if he even stuck around after that.

And, you know, that’s okay. I’m not entitled to any special knowledge by virtue of getting a ticket to this particular showing. Hell, anything he might have said would have colored my impressions of the film I hadn’t yet seen. So my enthusiasm wasn’t dampened. I hope he wasn’t having as lousy a night as it seemed like he was, but other than that, I was completely focused on seeing, for the first time, my favorite author’s words come to life on the big screen.

If anything, that’s actually my complaint.

Or the closest thing I have to a complaint.

There’s too much Pynchon in this film. When adapting it’s not uncommon to strive for fidelity to the source material, but I don’t really see the point. The film should be good on its own merits, and if that means it needs to deviate from the plot, characterization, themes, or anything else that worked perfectly well in the book, that’s fine. Anderson seems — for much of the film at least…read on — to want to be as true to the text as possible, and I think that hampers where it can go, and what it can achieve.

A pleasant surprise hit me early in the movie: this was Pynchon’s dialogue. Not dialogue adapted from Pynchon’s dialogue, but Pynchon’s actual dialogue. And I felt supremely vindicated, as one common complaint from readers is that his dialogue isn’t natural…that he has a tin ear for it. I can’t bring myself to agree with that at all…and Inherent Vice, the movie, should put that criticism to rest. Reading it, yes, it might seem a bit artificial, but that’s because Pynchon doesn’t adhere to textual speech patterns; he adheres to human speech patterns. Hearing skilled actors delivering the same words demonstrates the impact they can have, at least once you tune in to their frequency and stop expecting them to tune into yours.

But it was followed by a much less pleasant surprise: this was Pynchon’s narration. Not scenes adapted from Pynchon’s narration, but Pynchon’s actual narration. And it was overkill. The film by no means needed a narrator. Granted, the writing was solid, but it wasn’t written to be spoken over images of exactly what it’s describing. It renders itself redundant. We see that Doc is distraught, and we’re told that Doc is distraught. It provides an unfair barrier between us in the audience and Joaquin Phoenix playing the character, as though the film itself doesn’t trust his performance.

Now Inherent Vice has one hell of a difficult mystery at its core, and I could understand the desire to keep the narration if Anderson felt that it would help his audience to understand what was going on. But it’s not the mystery that gets narrated…it’s the emotion. The motive. The inner conflict. You know…all the stuff that actors get paid to portray without words. And I found the inclusion of so much narration to be a clumsy and distracting decision.

It’s nice, I guess, that the narration was provided by Shasta Fay Hepworth, a character in the film, but what we see of Shasta doesn’t really convince me that she thinks or speaks like Thomas Pynchon writes. It seems as though Doc might be narrating this entire thing in his head with Shasta’s voice, but I just don’t see the value as making up for the effort.

This does lead to a really nice moment toward the end of the film, however, when Doc asks Shasta what the phrase “inherent vice” means. She replies that she doesn’t know. The narrator version of Shasta then defines it for him, and for us…which is a cutesy touch, but isn’t nearly enough to justify the inclusion of the narration overall.

So, there. Now that I’ve got my big complaint out of the way, I can talk about what I liked…and there’s a lot of it.

For starters, Katherine Waterston as Shasta Fay. She not only looked the part…but she was Shasta Fay. She embodied that character deeply and flawlessly…so much so that it was painful to watch. She was an absolutely perfect casting choice, and I can’t imagine any other actor — at any point in time — would have handled it better.

Shasta opens the film by informing Doc — private eye, hippie, and her ex-lover — of a plot to kidnap her current beau, real-estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann. As in the book, Doc follows up on this lead and investigates other cases along the way…each of which seems to feed right back into Wolfmann’s disappearance.

Along the way Doc clashes regularly with his law enforcement counterpart, Bigfoot Bjornson, who is played by Josh Brolin in the film’s other perfect casting choice. Brolin could have settled for making Bigfoot a comic boob, and that would have worked perfectly well. Instead he adds layers of sadness to the character deeper than even the book managed. Whereas the novel plays Bigfoot’s acting ambitions for laughs, the film turns them into a kind of ongoing silent tragedy. There’s little sadder than watching him in the background of an episode of Adam-12, with no lines, hoping against hope that somebody, somewhere, will notice him.

I’ll get back to Bigfoot in a moment, as I have a lot more to say, but the film itself manages to be very good without matching the greatness of Waterston’s and Brolin’s performances. Inherent Vice lags behind them, which is frustrating, because those two seem to have drifted into our world from a parallel one in which there exists a better version of this film.

The rest of the casting choices are very good without being revelatory. Martin Short as Dr. Blatnoyd is an expected comic highlight, even though he’s only in around two scenes, and Owen Wilson handles himself quite well as a regretful saxophonist nobody’s supposed to know is still alive.

Benicio del Toro plays the thanklessly efficient part of Doc’s attorney, a substantial part in the book that gets reduced to an unfortunately paltry series of scenes here. I get the feeling more was shot and we’ll see it on the eventual DVD, but for now Sauncho Smilax turns up a handful of times to sit near or walk beside Doc, and that’s a big disappointment. In fact, I’d have recommended cutting the character altogether if his significance was so severely reduced.

That actually leads to another of my concerns: the concern for fidelity leads to a lot of characters making the jump to the screen without really having much to do once they get there. Sauncho is one of them, certainly. So is Tariq Khalil, who sets Doc on the trail of a man named Glen Charlock. Charlock turns up dead, and Khalil I guess just forgets he ever cared, because we never hear from him again. Later we meet Clancy Charlock, Glen’s sister, for no real reason that I could discern, and then she’s gone, too.

Having Doc meet with so many clients who immediately disappear is a bizarre choice. These characters have larger roles in the book, and while I understand that not everything can (or should) be carried over to the screen, it’s disappointing that instead we get a kind of half-measure. “Here,” the film seems to say. “Remember this guy?” We do, yes, but it’s hard to get excited when the film doesn’t do anything with him. In fact, the end credits are filled with character names that we never actually hear in the film. There was such a commitment to getting as much on the screen as possible that it didn’t even matter if there was any significance to them being there.

This is especially problematic in the case of the film’s main villains: Puck Beaverton, and Adrian Prussia. Puck appears several times in the film, but in the book he had his own entire subplot which helped to establish him as a credible — and ruthless — threat, as well as the kind of guy Doc should have nothing to do with. In the film he has a swastika on his face. Is that enough? Maybe. But if that’s all you get, is he even a character?

Prussia is served even more poorly. The main dark force in the book, we meet him very close to the end of the film. There’s no way to complain about this without spoiling it, but let’s just say this is his only scene. The bone-chilling powerhouse in the book — who draws Doc into a climactic and comic shootout that spills out into the streets — is here, and then he’s not. Some small attempt is made to weave him back into the things we’ve already seen, but it’s too little too late. The scariest motherfucker in the novel is a complete non-entity in the film, and he’s not really replaced by anything else. His a walking signifier of all the things missing from the movie. Not just as an adaptation, but as a movie period.

At one point in Doc’s investigations he turns up the fact that Prussia was responsible for the death of Bigfoot’s partner. It sheds a lot of light on Bigfoot’s behavior in both the film and the book, but we last see Bigfoot in the book still following his desperate need for revenge, and it’s so pitiful that we can’t help but feel for him and hate him at the same time.

In the movie…well, that doesn’t happen. It’s replaced by a scene I’m not even sure I can explain. If you watch it, you’ll know what I mean when you get there, whether or not you’ve read the book.

Inherent Vice will probably grow on me. I’m sure I’ll watch it many, many more times. But as of right now, it feels like I’ve seen half of a film. Having read the book means I can fill in some of the blanks, but really what I wanted was a piece of art that could stand on its own merits…even if it had nothing in common with the novel but its name.

I’d have preferred a simplified plot to a rushed one, and a few different characters combined to loads of characters that have little or nothing to do.

The movie gets a lot right. The casting is never less than great. The soundtrack is perfect. The resolution of the dead saxophonist case — one of the very few things in this film that has a resolution — is genuinely sweet. There are excellent comic moments sprinkled throughout, and glimpses of a great film that somehow only managed to be very good.

I think my feelings about the adaptation can be summed up by looking at the ending. I won’t mention any specifics; I just want to say that at the end of the book, there’s a scene that seems irrelevant…and yet, reading it, I knew exactly how we got to that scene, and why. It mattered. At the end of the film there’s a scene that seems very relevant, and yet I couldn’t tell you why we ended up there. It has to matter, because it’s the end of the film, but that’s about all I can say for sure.

It’s worth seeing, I’d say. But it’s not the film it could have been.

Of course, I’m coming at this as a guy who read the book way too many times. Maybe my expectations, despite my best efforts, weren’t properly aligned. To find out, tune in a little later; a friend who’s never read the book but is deeply passionate about film will be providing a second review of Inherent Vice for Noiseless Chatter. I’m curious to see what he’ll have to say, based only on the merits of what was on the screen.

Surprising no-one, I love the new Wes Anderson film. I’m going to get that out of the way right now. And I honestly believe this has every potential to be his masterpiece. (Of course, the man’s made at least three strong contenders for “his masterpiece” by now, so I’m positive this is a question that can’t be seriously discussed for another few decades.)

I expected to like it. The trailers looked great, it’s full of fantastic actors, and it was the first full-length screenplay that Anderson wrote solo. Those are all very promising components, and I didn’t expect they’d disappoint.

The surprise, however, came with just how good this movie turned out to be. It’s a moving, rollicking, tragicomic juggernaut of a film, and I haven’t been this deeply affected by a movie-going experience since…well…The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

The plot of The Grand Budapest Hotel is so layered, so dense with momentum, so quick to evolve and so vast in the span of time it covers that I could fill this entire review with the most basic of summaries. There’s a reason the trailer seemed so schizophrenic; the movie doesn’t stay put.

As such, I won’t be saying much about the plot of this film, so don’t fear spoilers. I’m going to talk a lot about what I got from the film, but not necessarily much about what was visually on the screen.

Suffice it to say, however, that the core of the film is the relationship between Zero — a young, penniless immigrant who becomes employed as The Grand Budapest’s lobby boy — and his boss, the concierge M. Gustave. The two get wrapped up in a caper, a mystery, a scandal, and a creeping international conflict, all of which sets the stage for expected comedy, and unexpected profundity.

Ralph Fiennes plays Gustave with an impeccably charming air of self-importance, and at first he seems to be a classic Anderson dick in the tradition of Royal Tenenbaum or Steve Zissou, and his terse, meticulous demands of perfection seem to channel both Max Fischer and Francis Whitman. However Gustave reveals himself before long as something much more complex; he’s a dick for a noble purpose. He’s a dick because that’s the only way he knows to bring comfort to those around him. And it works.

Under Gustave’s supervision, The Grand Budapest flourishes. He might be condescending and overbearing to his staff, but it’s because Gustave knows one of humanity’s saddest secrets: societal order is not achieved…it is imposed. And if you don’t impose the order as firmly as possible, it’s a matter of time before somebody else will impose theirs upon you.

With The Grand Budapest, Gustave has imposed rigid order upon an isolated society of his own making. (It’s not just visual quirk that sets the palatial hotel upon a largely inaccessible mountaintop.) Gustave is, thematically speaking, a dictator…but he dictates benevolence.

A darkness intrudes, however, and it intrudes on multiple levels. From a creeping war — which first claimed Zero’s family and threatens to claim the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, in which this film is set — to the more personal tragedy of the murder of Gustave’s elderly lover.

There’s a brilliant moment early in film during which Gustave learns the news from the morning paper, letting his eyes roll past the massive headline announcing the invading army down to the photograph of his now deceased ladyfriend, announcing her death. It’s a perfect illustration of the way our personal tragedies, though relatively small, will always hit us harder than the larger, impersonal ones…even if it’s the larger, impersonal ones that should be demanding our attention.

It’s also a nested tragedy — one murder within the boundaries of large-scale war atrocity — which contributes to one of the movie’s main themes: layering. It’s not uncommon for Anderson’s work to see gestures, statements and plot points operating on multiple planes, but it’s never been brought to the fore in quite this way.

The opening scene of The Grand Budapest Hotel sees a young girl in a graveyard, reading from a book. That book contains the action of our film, so the young girl reading it is layer one. Layer two is the book itself, which is narrated by its author and purports, at least, to be non-fiction. The author recounts meeting a much older Zero, who tells him the story in conversation, which makes that conversation layer three. The flashbacks themselves are layer four, which is where we spend most of the film: watching the events play out. And any scene in which Zero is not present must have been relayed to him second hand, at a later point, giving us an ultimate story that’s at least five layers deep, and potentially subject to false memory or self-censorship at any one of those levels.

In evidence of that claim, the film has the older Zero admit that he’s not comfortable discussing Agatha, as it’s too painful. This would be very fair if he were speaking only about an old, lost love, but as she’s an integral part of the story we are hearing / reading / seeing, it’s a potentially problematic omission. We catch glimpses only of the less painful moments he spends with her, and, of course, the ones necessary to our understanding of the plot. The rest — including what must be the most painful moment to him — is either left unspoken or referenced so briefly and obliquely that the words do not coalesce into a visual portrait for us…it’s the conversational equivalent of something happening off-camera, and so that’s exactly what it does.

This deliberate obfuscation of the love story may be a response to Anderson’s previous film, Moonrise Kingdom, in which the love story was front and center, and which we witnessed unfold with unblinking eyes, sparing us nothing, just as the couple in question was spared nothing.

It wouldn’t be the first time Anderson directly replied to the themes of one film with the themes of his next. Rushmore was about a young boy reaching beyond his lowly station in life, with a father who loved and supported him in his ambitions to a fault. That was followed by The Royal Tenenbaums, which followed grown children who had tumbled from their higher stations in life, with a father who did not support them and whose love was debatable. Then The Life Aquatic, which had a father-son relationship as its very core and as the driving force behind every event in the film, was followed by The Darjeeling Limited, wherein the never-seen father died before the movie began, leaving the brothers Whitman to limp along in their own ways without him. (The Darjeeling Limited also begins with the father figure from the previous film, Bill Murray, being left behind by the train that bears this film’s title. It’s not the most subtle thing in the world, but it does what it needs to do.)

In fact, much of The Grand Budapest Hotel feels like a response to Anderson’s previous films, with moments of bleak darkness, unexpected violence and genuinely chilling suspense working their way into a movie by a director who is by and large pretty life-affirming.

The darkness in Grand Budapest hits twice as hard because it’s also Anderson’s most overtly comic film. Sight-gags abound — all of them perfect — and Gustave is nothing if not a fountain of caustic one-liners. There’s a cartoony set-piece that kicks off the final third of the film (arguably two cartoony set-pieces), but all of this feels like the film’s own coping mechanism for the darkness it has to face. It’s a world coming apart, and it’s already as good as gone. The film has a sense of humor about its own internal tragedies, because, if it didn’t, what would it be? It’s humanity’s way of keeping the terror at bay. It’s necessary. And it’s heartbreaking.

Moments of broad comedy give way to tragedy, which then evolves into horror…and is then joined by another moment of comedy. There’s no better encapsulation of this than Gustave provides himself, while behind bars: he tells Zero of a fellow inmate named Pinky who ridiculed him, which grew into a fistfight, which itself ended with both men seriously battered…but since then he’s come to consider Pinky a dear friend. Comedy, tragedy, horror, comedy. It’s a cycle that recurs throughout the film, and it keeps us from ever feeling confident in the balance.

And is there really any balance? The stalled cable car creaks emptily to the pulse of the soundtrack, which is lovely, but what’s to keep it from just…letting go?

It’s all cycles and layers. Layered cycles, and cycled layering. Poor Zero begins his apprenticeship having lost everything, and though he rises — in more ways than you might expect — we know from the way other things have worked in the film that he will come full circle. In fact, his very name is emblematic of a circle, and is synonymous with nothingness. And the film knows it.

Humanity is an agreement. That might be the main theme of The Grand Budapest Hotel. We create the world, even if we don’t. Everything we do and everything we don’t do is responsible for the society in which we live, whether that society is an isolated hotel, a fictional republic, a war-torn continent, or an era rapidly approaching antiquity.

We see The Grand Budapest Hotel at the height of its glorious austerity. We see The Grand Budapest as a crumbling shell that once housed greatness. We see Zubrowka as a still-bright outpost in dreary world, and we see Zubrowka fall to the hands of its conquerors.

The Grand Budapest Hotel was Gustave’s gift to humanity, but it couldn’t last. An older Zero observes that Gustave’s world was gone before Gustave even entered it. There’s a reason he enjoys romancing elderly ladies so much: it’s not just the attention — though undoubtedly he does like that — but it’s the desperate clinging to a fast-fading past. It’s a chance to hold with both arms the dwindling numbers that can still recall a brighter day.

And there’s a reason that the death of his lover is what sets the entire plot into motion, and thus the entire nested crumbling that constitutes the whole of the film. It’s an intrusion of reality, a blunt reminder that humanity is an agreement, and it only takes one person to act in violation of that agreement for everything to come falling down.

While Gustave is traveling with Zero to see his lover for one last time before she’s buried, the train is stopped and boarded by military policemen. A problem with Zero’s papers results in a rough moment of brutality, but it is stopped by one of the MPs, who recognizes Gustave as a good man who had shown him much kindness when he was a boy.

The train pulls away, and Gustave, nose bloodied and hair disheveled, begins to use this as a teachable moment. He lectures Zero about the importance and magnitude of these small flickers of humanity…but quickly abandons the lesson in favor of a defeated, heartbreaking, “Fuck it.”

There is a lesson to be learned from what happened there, but, unfortunately, it isn’t the lesson Gustave wishes it to be.

Reality encroaches. Agreements are honored, but more rarely, and only this time. Not everybody who imposes order does it for the good of others.

Gustave’s world was not only gone before he entered it, but before we entered it. By the time it’s printed in the book being read by a young girl in a cemetery, The Grand Budapest is already demolished. It no longer exists. Whatever order applied there at whatever time is no longer relevant.

At least, not unless its own faint flicker of humanity inspires another.

We create the world in which we live. Everything we do, and everything we don’t do.