Movie Review: The Gambler

The Gambler
Directed by: Rupert Wyatt.
Written by: William Monahan based on the 1974 film written by James Toback.
Starring: Mark Wahlberg (Jim Bennett), Jessica Lange (Roberta), Brie Larson (Amy Phillips), Michael Kenneth Williams (Neville Baraka), John Goodman (Frank), Alvin Ing (Mister Lee), Anthony Kelley (Lamar Allen), Emory Cohen (Dexter), Domenick Lombardozzi (Big Ernie), George Kennedy (Ed), Andre Braugher (Dean Fuller).

Like every film written by James Toback, the 1974 version of The Gambler is as much a personal exploration of Toback’s own tortured psyche as it is a story. That film told the story of a college professor, from a rich family, who gets in deep in debt with a bunch of loan sharks to feed his gambling habit. He isn’t a smart gambler – his basic strategy is to bet it all until he loses – riding the high while it lasts, the whole time knowing that it cannot last for long. He has a girlfriend (Lauren Hutton) – who is he basically horrible to, and throughout the movie you get the sense that you are watching a man trying to commit suicide – hoping to get so far in debt that he cannot get out, and someone will kill him. By the end of the movie, he has, once again, got himself out of debt – and decides to push even farther – in a confused ending that adds a degree of racism to a movie that never addressed it before.

I wasn’t a big fan of the original film – it was fine, with a great performance by James Caan, but the ending marred the film, and it moved slowly throughout. For some reason, producer-star Mark Wahlberg wanted to remake the film – a decision that is even odder when you see the film, since gone is much of what Toback brought to the film – and it is replaced by style and flash – the problematic ending has been changed to another problematic ending. Yet the film, for all its faults, is incredibly entertaining from start to finish. The original film was a flawed yet personal movie. The remake is flawed and impersonal – seeming more like the product of a studio focus group than a personal statement, like the original. Yet oddly, if I had to watch one of the films a second time – I would easily choose the remake.

Wahlberg reteams with The Departed screenwriter William Monahan in The Gambler. That film, probably gave Wahlberg his best role to date (it was his only Oscar nomination so far) – and the dialogue in The Gambler has the same snap as it did in that film – and Wahlberg handles it well. He is all false confidence and bravado – and the movie gives a chance to Wahlberg to swagger in a way he hasn’t in a little while. Like James Caan in the original, Wahlberg plays a college professor from a rich family, getting himself deeper and deeper in debt with the type of people he shouldn’t be in debt to. He owes over $200K to Mister Lee (Alvin Ing) – who wants his money, and warns of dire consequences if he doesn’t get it. To try and get it, he borrows money from Neville Baraka (Michael Kenneth Williams) – who may just kill Wahlberg for sport, after he laughs at Neville when they cut cards. To get the money to pay them both, he asks his rich mother (Jessica Lange) – who gives it him, and then instead of paying off the debt, he blows it all at the tables once again. So he turns around, again, and borrows from Frank (John Goodman) – most often seen in a sauna, breathing heavily and sweating, but letting him know just how bad things will be if he doesn’t get his money. It looks like, once again, the main character is suicidal – wanting someone to kill him. But Wahlberg doesn’t really want to die – all he wants to do is completely destroy himself, his life, his relationship with his family, his job – and everything else. He hates himself so much he feels the only way to get better is to force himself to start from scratch.

The other main character in the film is Amy (Brie Larson) – one of Wahlberg’s students, who is working her way through school as a waitress in one of the underground casinos Wahlberg frequents. In class, Wahlberg basically berates his students – mocking their goals of becoming writers, saying that unless you’re a genius, you have no business trying to write. He thinks Amy is that genius – and lets the entire class know this as well, during one of his “lectures” – that seem more like public meltdowns than anything else. Still, Amy decides she likes Wahlberg – and seduces him into a relationship with her. The relationship doesn’t work in the movie – we never get to see why precisely Wahlberg thinks she is a genius, and the film never gives us an indication of what either character sees in the other. Still, Larson makes the character work a whole hell of a lot better than it has any right to. Larson is one of the best young actresses in Hollywood – so effortlessly charming, funny and sexy. She handles the fast dialogue with ease – and she has a real chemistry with Wahlberg, even if the screenplay doesn’t give the relationship any reason to work.

Like Larson, the rest of the cast is similarly game – handling the great dialogue well, and disguising the fact that all of the characters are one note. Especially great is Williams and Goodman – who are so good that I wish the whole movie was about them. The direction by Rupert Wyatt is also very good – yes, he overdoses on style, but with a screenplay that movies this fast, but is also this shallow, that helps. I especially liked the musical choices – which seemingly is mainly made up of great covers or 1970s songs – I guess if you’re remaking a 1970s film, you may as well fill up the soundtrack with remakes as well.

 
The Gambler is far from a great movie – but it is a hell of a lot of fun. No, it doesn’t have the personal touch of the original film, but I don’t think that’s really a bad thing. The original The Gambler felt rather self-indulgent, with a lot of retrograde attitudes about masculinity, gender, sex and race. The remake may lack a personal touch – but that’s not such a bad thing in this case.

Movie Review: Finding Fela

Finding Fela
Directed by: Alex Gibney.

Fela Kuti was an important figure in African culture during his life. As a musician, he created a genre – Afrobeat – combining many different genres into something wholly original. Through his trips abroad – to London and Los Angeles – he grows a social conscience, and when he returned to Nigeria, he incorporated his newfound politics into his music. All throughout the 1970s, he poked fun at the corrupt leaders who ruled his country – an assortment of military dictatorships – who didn’t like what he was doing, but didn’t really stop him either. During his life, Fela was hugely famous and influential – both in Africa and outside of it. But he wasn’t a saint either. He basically had his own harem – he married 26 women at one time, and believed women should know their place. He used drugs – mainly pot – throughout his life. He died young, at 58, from AIDS – a disease he refused to admit he even had.

The documentary Finding Fela struggles to find a way to tell his story – but its struggles somehow make the film all the more fascinating. It was directed by Alex Gibney – undeniably the most prolific documentarian working today. His breakthrough film was Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) – and he won an Oscar two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side. Finding Fela is his 10^th feature documentary since that Oscar win (and that doesn’t even include various shorts, TV docs – including the excellent Catching Hell about poor Steve Bartman, who many believe cost the Cubs the World Series with a fan interference call. Almost all of his films are good – some of them are even great – but I wonder if they would be better if he made fewer of them. In 2015, we may get 3 more from Gibney – one about James Brown, one about Frank Sinatra and one about Scientology.

Finding Fela feels like two competing documentaries throughout its running time. One is a straight forward biographical documentary, charting Fela's rise, his time at the top, the controversies that he caused, and his eventual death. This is a mixture of archival footage – concert footage and interviews with the man, and present day talking heads, talking about his music and his life. One of the most interesting things about these interviews is that Gibney actually includes some analysis of Fela's music – what made so revolutionary – instead of just paying it lip service. The other documentary is a making of stage show documentary, following Bill T. Jones as he struggles to find a way to turn Fela’s life into a musical – which he eventually did with Fela! Fela’s life presented many challenges for Jones – how to deal with the women, the complicated politics that Jones knows most audiences will be clueless about, how to handle his illness and death (that last one, Jones chose to cut out) – and perhaps most importantly, how to translate the music into a typical musical format. Fela’s songs were not typical songs – they would go on for 20 minutes or more, slowly building until they become an all-encompassing force. You cannot do that in a stage musical – nor can you do that in documentary. So, oddly, the second documentary – the making of musical stage show – mirrors the difficulty that Gibney himself must have had translating Fela’s life into a movie.

 
Like most documentaries focused on a famous figure then, Finding Fela is probably best for people who don’t know anything about its subject – which fortunately includes me. Gibney seems to be of the same opinion as Jones was when he crafted the musical – that the audience for the film wouldn’t have any clue of the complex political system that Fela fought against, or anything about his music. The film certainly feels like it just skims the surface of the complex man, his times and his music. To a certain extent, it also feels like an advertisement for the musical it portrays as well. The film is never less than fascinating – and if I get a chance, I may well check out the musical at some point. But more than anything, it makes me want to seek out a concert doc of Fela’s. I have a feeling that by watching the man himself on stage for a couple of hours, I may get an even better appreciation for him – and

Movie Review: Unbroken

Unbroken
Directed by: Angelina Jolie.
Written by: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand.
Starring: Jack O'Connell (Louis Zamperini), Domhnall Gleeson (Phil), Garrett Hedlund (Fitzgerald), Takamasa Ishihara (Watanabe), Finn Wittrock (Mac), Jai Courtney (Cup), Maddalena Ischiale (Louise), Vincenzo Amato (Anthony), John Magaro (Tinker), Luke Treadaway (Miller), Louis McIntosh (Harris), Ross Anderson (Blackie), C.J. Valleroy (Young Louie), John D'Leo (Young Pete), Alex Russell (Older Pete).

There is no question that the real Louis Zamperini lived an extraordinary life – and survived an extraordinary ordeal during his service in WWII. This is a man of humble beginnings – the son of Italian immigrants in America, who became one of the best high school track athletes in America – went to compete at the Olympics in 1936 in Berlin, before joining the army. While working as a bombardier, his plane goes down, and he spends weeks barely surviving on a raft alongside two friends. He is then captured by the Japanese – and undergoes a horrible ordeal in a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Most people would never have survived what Zamperini did – and he went onto live decades after that (to sometime in 2014 in fact). But the question about Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, the movie based on Zamperini’s wartime experience, is whether his story provides the basis for a very good movie – and I don’t really think it does. A more accurate title for the more would be One Damn Thing After Another – because that is pretty much how the movie is structured – it moves from one trying ordeal to another. There is no real structure to the movie – it never really flows from one part to the next. It sprinkles flashbacks haphazardly throughout the film – and then essentially abandons that when it no longer serves a neat dramatic purpose. The screenplay is the work of four Oscar nominated writers – the Coen brothers, Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson – and I have a feeling that the reason why it went through so many talented writers is because no one could really crack the movie. Instead of realizing that, and ditching the movie, they just went ahead and filmed it as is.

All of that probably makes it sound like I hated Unbroken – which I really didn’t. But I was frustrated by it, because there are individual things about the movie that are actually quite good. As always, the cinematography by Roger Deakins is excellent – especially in the protracted segment of the film on the raft. Deakins is one of the great cinematographers working today – and his work here does at least make the film look great at times. The score by Alexandre Desplat is good as well – yes, it pulls at the heartstrings and tries for unearned uplift at times -  but it never seems too overbearing. Jack O’Connell, who plays Zamperini, is one of the most promising young actors working today – see his performance in Starred Up for example of this. He isn’t great here like he was there – but he’s solid, and he anchors the film for its entire running time. The rest of the cast isn’t given very much to do. Domhnall Gleeson is fine as  Zamperini’s best friend – although he spends much of the movie either unconscious, or close to it. Takamasa Ishihara, better known as Japanese pop star Miyavi, plays Zamperini’s chief antagonist and tormentor in the final act in the Japanese prison camp – but he’s given no shade of grey or any trace of humanity to play. He’s a horrible human being from the start, and is essentially given that one note to play.

The film has a tendency to drag. Its well over two hours, and there seems to be long stretches where not very much is happening. As a director, Jolie doesn’t seem to have much sense as to how to keep the film moving – to keep the pace from flagging. There are moments of promise in Unbroken (and her first film, In the Land of Blood and Honey, which I never saw, is fairly well regarded). I hope she makes a better film the next time out. However, here, I think she was too in love with the story to really see that it wouldn’t really make an effective movie. It’s not a bad movie – but it just isn’t very good either.

Movie Review: Li'l Quinquin

Li’l Quinquin
Directed by: Bruno Dumont.
Written by: Bruno Dumont.
Starring: Alane Delhaye (Li’l Quinquin), Bernard Pruvost (Commandant Van der Weyden), Lucy Caron (Eve Terrier), Philippe Jore (Lieutenant Carpentier), Philippe Peuvion (Père Quinquin), Lisa Hartmann (Aurélie Terrier), Julien Bodard (Kevin), Corentin Carpentier (Jordan), Pascal Fresch (Mr. Campin), Jason Cirot (Dany Lebleu), Baptiste Anquez (Mohamed Bhiri), Stéphane Boutillier (Mr. Lebleu), Frédéric Castagno (Vétérinaire), Andrée Peuvion (Grand-Mère Lebleu), Lucien Chaussoy (Grand-Père Lebleu), Cindy Louguet (Mme Campin), Céline Sauvage (Mère Quinquin).

With the possible exception of Michael Haneke, there is probably no other contemporary director who punishes his characters – and the audience – as much as Bruno Dumont. His films have been compared to Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer– and there is a similarity there to be sure – but Dumont seems much more like an active participant in his films. He isn’t an invisible presence; he seems to be deliberately messing with his characters and his audience. So the word that Dumont had made a comedy was intriguing. There is nothing in the other Dumont films I have seen – L’humanite (1999), Twentynine Palms (2003), Hors Satan (2011) and Camille Claudel 1915 (2013) – that was at all humorous (at least not intentionally – Dumont, at times, is so serious that you cannot help but giggle at the parade of misery he trots out). But his latest, Li’l Quinquin, which started it life as a TV miniseries in France, but has played festivals as a single 3 hour, 25 minute (which is how its playing in limited release – and on Fandor, which is where I saw it), is a comedy in some ways. But it isn’t a laugh out loud comedy with lots of jokes – it’s more of a surreal comedy in the David Lynch way, mixed with Dumont’s typical questioning of the ugliness of humanity. Li’l Quinquin then is a surprising thing indeed – a Bruno Dumont comedy that still feels like a Bruno Dumont film. I didn’t think that was possible.

The movie opens with the grisly discovery of a body – it has been chopped up and found inside of a cow. As the movie moves along, the body count rises, and the bodies are found in various disgusting ways – more in cows, but also in slurry tanks or eaten by pigs, etc. Dumont doesn’t show very much of the blood – and he doesn’t really show any of the violence itself – but that still doesn’t make it easier to take. The movie focuses on two characters – Commandant Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost), the police detective in charge of the investigation. Weyden is an bizarre character – he looks like he could play Albert Einstein in a biopic without much makeup or hair work done. He is also a bundle of bizarre facial tics, and a strange walk. I don’t know if Pruvost has these tics and walk naturally, or if he affected them for the movie itself – like almost all Dumont actors, he is an amateur who has never worked before, so I don’t know. He seems like a comic figure – an Inspector Clouseau type – at least at first. But as the movie moves along, I think he proves himself to at least be a competent – if eccentric – investigator. The other main character is the title one – Li’l Quinquin (Alane Delhaye), a boy of about 12, who hangs out with his “girlfriend” Eve (Lucy Caron), and his buddies all day, every day (it is summer vacation). They get into mischief, and always seem to be lurking behind Pruvost every time a body is found.

The movie is long, and broken into four parts – which shows us the miniseries roots. But it doesn’t play like four different episodes, but instead one long movie. The various parts end and the next episode starts seemingly right away – you could remove the title cards and you would never guess the movie was a miniseries. Because the movie is so long, the characters get more complex as it moves along – especially Li’l Quinquin. He seems like a harmless kid – getting into trouble, but nothing too bad – lighting off fireworks, sneaking in where they aren’t supposed to be, etc. But as the movie goes along, and Dumont introduces a different plot thread – that of xenophobia and anti-immigrant feelings towards the Muslim and African immigrants in the small French town – and no one is perhaps more racist than Li’l Quinquin and his friends. Yet, the movie never makes him into a truly “bad” character – he can be a jerk when he’s with his friends, but his difficult home life can explain part of that, and when it’s just him and his girlfriend, he can actually be rather sweet and sensitive. This is a Dumont character through and through – where the goodness and badness lay side by side in one character.

The film is long, but it is never less than interesting. It held my attention throughout its entire runtime. But it never really reaches the next level – that would push the movie from good to great. Perhaps because Dumont knew he had more time than ever before, he introduces so many characters and plot threads, that some seem to get lost in the mix. He also doesn’t seem all that interested in solving the central mystery of who did all the killings – which are clearly related, as all the victims know each other (many of them, intimately). But Dumont doesn’t provide an answer – hell he doesn’t really give us a clue. As Weydon says near the end of the movie – all the suspects have been murdered. In some ways, this links it to some of the best crime films of the last decade – Memories of Murder, Aurora, Police Adjective, Zodiac, etc. But here, it kind of feels like a copout – just one more Dumont provocation. The film overall works – and it’s interesting to see Dumont work in a different mode than you are used to, even if the ultimate destination is the same. But like many of Dumont’s films – I think the film would work better if Dumont didn’t try to provoke as much as he does.

Movie Review: Closed Curtain

Closed Curtain
Directed by: Jafar Panahi & Kambuzia Partovi.
Written by: Jafar Panahi.
Starring: Kambuzia Partovi (Writer), Maryam Moqadam (Melika), Jafar Panahi (Himself), Hadi Saeedi (Melika's Brother), Azadeh Torabi (Melika's Sister), Abolghasem Sobhani (Agha Olia), Mahyar Jafaripour (Younger Brother), Zeynab Kanoum (Herself).

Jafar Panahi has been banned from making films since 2010 – and yet, since then he has made two films. In 2011, there was This is Not a Film, which was a documentary about Panahi, in his apartment (with his cat) as he was waiting on his appeal – he had been sentenced to 6 years in jail, and faced a 20 year ban from having anything to do with making a new film, or leaving Iran. He was convicted for propaganda – but basically, his crime was supporting the “wrong” party in an “election”. This is Not a Film was filmed mainly with an iPhone, and was smuggled out of Iran on a memory stick inside of a cake to get its debut at Cannes. Panahi was defiant and angry throughout This is Not a Fiim. His new film, Closed Curtain, is not a documentary – but like This is Not a Film, is a portrait of Panahi in exile. If he was defiant and angry in This is Not a Film, he is more sad and resigned to his fate in Closed Curtain.

The movie centers on a writer (co-director Kambuzia Partovi), who is clearly inspired by Panahi himself. He arrives at a secluded beach house, and releases his dog from a gym bag – and soon we will find out why. Dogs are considered “unclean” – and have been banned in public in Iran. Later we’ll learn more – than the writer got into a fight over his dog, and is now hiding out at the beach house of a friend to try and let it all blow over. He is writing a screenplay – perhaps the screenplay for the movie we are watching. And then, two people arrive unexpectedly at the house. Melika (Maryam Moqadam) is a young woman and “they” are apparently after her. She is brought there by her brother – and when the writer tries to throw them out, he refuses. He says that he’s leaving Melika here – and the writer must watch her, to ensure she doesn’t kill herself. He’s going to get a car to take her away – and will be back soon. We never see him again – and the two characters share the house uneasily. They argue over who should leave – who “belongs” at the house. They are characters in search of their story, and their creator. And that is when Panahi, playing himself, shows up.

The film is neatly divided into two parts – before and after Panahi show up. It is his house after all. We see the posters for his former movies, and he stalks about the empty house. If he sees either the writer or Melika, he doesn’t acknowledge them. In their conversations, they acknowledge Panahi – working together to try and provoke Panahi into doing something.

The first half of the film is more effective than the second. The first half of the movie is mysterious, and seems like it could go in any number of different directions. You sit there and try and figure it all out. How much of this is “real”, how much is “imagined” – etc. The second half of the film isn’t nearly as effective – once the movie starts to reveal its mysteries, they become much less interesting.

What that second half of the film does do very well though is act as a portrait of Panahi – and how his creativity and imagination can both set him free, and yet act as a prison itself. Closed Curtain isn’t the type of film that Panahi would make if he were to have complete creative freedom. He can imagine different films, but he doesn’t have the same outlet he used to have. For two films in a row, Panahi is stuck making a film in his own home because he cannot do it any other way. I would love to see Panahi make another film like The Circle or Crimson Gold or Offside again. But he can’t. He’s stuck making Closed Curtain. That makes the film interesting – but it isn’t the film Panahi should be making.

Movie Review: Korengal

Korengal
Directed by: Sebastian Junger.

In 2010, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington made the documentary Restrepo – which follows one platoon over the course of a year in the Korengal valley in Afghanistan – one of the deadliest and most dangerous areas in America’s War on Terror. That film was a fascinating portrait of the men who are fighting this war – what they go through and what they feel about their mission. It was a film that wasn’t about politics – none of the men really mention what they feel about the ultimate mission that politicians talk about. It was trying to survive – and fighting for the guys next to them, more than for the rest of the country. Now, four years later, Junger has made Korengal (Hetherington was tragically killed while covering another war – something covered in Junger’s documentary from 2013, Which Way to the Frontline from Here?). Korengal takes place in the same valley, follows the same soldiers, and has interviews with the men back at home as they reflect on those experiences. It is a fine documentary – a good companion piece to Restrepo. And yet, I don’t think it really adds much to what has come before.

The film continues talking to these men about their feelings about their mission. As it becomes clear during the course of the movie – they don’t much think about the politics of the mission. They are trying to do their job. They know that they are in a key position – a lot of Taliban fighters move through the area with supplies and weapons. The Taliban knows the area well – they move easily through the rocky mountains, with heavy gear, without an issue. The Americans struggle more – they don’t know the terrain as well. They don’t know the routes. Their heavy machinery exhausts them when they try to move it.

The movie also follows them when they try to talk to the various people who live in the valley – and the difficulty that comes with trying to win “their hearts and minds”. They almost don’t care about winning them – they know the people in the valley are in a tough spot – trying to appease them, the foreign army, and also having to deal with the Taliban, who could show up at any time. They have to try and win over the citizens – but know it’s a fruitless effort. Eventually they will leave, and the Taliban will still be there.

The movie is basically about how these guys try and survive there – going out on patrols that they know could turn deadly at any time. All the firefights they get into – which the men admit they miss know that their mission is over. That adrenaline rush is tough to top. They don’t much care if some of their behavior seems insensitive or bloodthirsty. They are just trying to survive – and fight for the people around them.

 
All of this is handled well by Junger. He obviously has a good report with the guys – and they open up to him more than they probably would with others. Yet, I cannot help but think that Junger (and Hetherington) already covered all this in Restrepo. The new movie is interesting – and well made. But it cannot have the same impact as Restrepo – which felt somewhat more revelatory. Here, it’s more of the same – and while that’s important, it also cannot possibly have the same impact.

Movie Review: Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson.
Written by: Paul Thomas Anderson based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon.
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix (Larry "Doc" Sportello), Josh Brolin (Lt. Det. Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen), Katherine Waterston (Shasta Fay Hepworth), Owen Wilson (Coy Harlingen), Benicio Del Toro (Sauncho Smilax, Esq), Hong Chau (Jade), Jena Malone (Hope Harlingen), Reese Witherspoon (Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball), Martin Short (Dr.Rudy Blatnoyd, D.D.S.), Joanna Newsom (Sortilège), Jordan Christian Hearn (Denis), Jeannie Berlin (Aunt Reet), Eric Roberts (Michael Z. Wolfmann), Serena Scott Thomas (Sloane Wolfmann), Maya Rudolph (Petunia Leeway), Michael Kenneth Williams (Tariq Khalil), Yvette Yates (Luz), Andrew Simpson (Riggs Warbling), Sam Jaeger (Agent Flatweed), Timothy Simons (Agent Borderline), Jack Kelly (Burke Stodger), illian Bell (Chlorinda), Michelle Sinclair (Clancy Charlock), Sasha Pieterse (Japonica Fenway), Keith Jardine (Puck Beaverton), Peter McRobbie (Adrian Prussia), Martin Donovan (Crocker Fenway).

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, a faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel of the same name, meanders more than any other movie in recent memory. It has a complex plot – all involving Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a PI, and the various people who have hired him to work for them – and there is a lot of them. Somehow all of these plots come together in the end. Or maybe they don’t – but it doesn’t really matter. In many ways, the Pynchon novel, and now the Anderson film is a spiritual heir to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels - in particular The Long Goodbye, which one of Anderson’s favorite filmmakers Robert Altman made into a masterpiece in 1973. Re-reading those Marlowe novels again a few months ago – after reading Pynchon’s novel – I was struck by two things about the plot – the first being how complicated they were, and the second how inconsequential they are to the enjoyment of the novel itself. In Chandler, it was all about the writing style, the dialogue and Marlowe himself. Although I also noticed how often in Marlowe novels the end result would have been the same even if Marlowe wasn’t hired in the first damn place – he’s there more to act as a witness to the corruption and murder of those all around him, than to really untangle it.

See, this is the type of film Inherent Vice is – one that goes off into tangents, and gets me off on them as well. I didn’t mean to start writing about Philip Marlowe, but I did anyway. And I’m leaving it there because it gives you an idea of what watching Inherent Vice is like. It is a movie that has a major through line – that of Sportello investigating the disappearance of Mickey Wolfmann, who is the current boyfriend of Doc’s ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), who asks Doc to look into what Mickey’s wife, Sloan, and her lover, may have planned for Mickey – only to disappear at the same time Mickey does, although perhaps not to the same place. But throughout the movie Doc will also be hired by a member of a black panther like group (Michael K. Williams) to find the Neo-Nazi bodyguard of Wolfmann as well. And by Hope Harlington (Jena Malone) to find her supposedly dead husband, Cole (Owen Wilson) – who will in turn ask Doc to look in on Hope and their daughter, because he can’t, because he has turned snitch for the cops. He’ll also keep running into Jade (Hong Chau), a “masseuse”, who likes Doc and warns him away from the Golden Fang – which leads him to a strange encounter with Dr. Blatnoyd (Martin Short), who then has an unfortunate accident with a trampoline. I haven’t even mentioned his lawyer, played by Benicio Del Toro, perhaps cast because he also played Hunter S. Thompson’s lawyer in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Or his sometimes girlfriend, a DA played by Reese Witherspoon, who is straight well on duty, and seemingly disgusted by the pot smoking Doc, but still visits him late at night for “pizza”. Oh, and the film’s central love story may just be between Doc and Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a cop with a flat top, who verbally and/or physically abuses Doc almost every time they meet, although underneath all that bluster, there are really tender feelings that flow both ways – both often in silence.

I do believe that most of these plot threads are tired up in the end – at least somewhat. I also believe that it doesn’t really matter if they are and aren’t, because the movie isn’t really about its plot anyway. I’m sure there will be numerous internet postings dedicated to ironing out all the mysteries in the movie – and I’m also sure I won’t read any of them because I really don’t care.

So then what is Inherent Vice about then? Well, it’s about a lot of things – but most obviously it is about the rot that set in after the idealism of the 1960s, before Watergate introduced the mass cynicism of the 1970s. Manson is referenced a number of times throughout Inherent Vice – and Manson is often cited as one of the moments that killed the 1960s. Inherent Vice takes place in 1970 – in Los Angeles – and the spirit of the 1960s is all but dead. Doc is doing his best to keep it alive – he’s never not stoned in the movie, and has massive mutton chop sideburns, long hair, a ridiculous hat, and still uses phrases like “far out” ironically. But he’s going through the motions as much as anything – he’s miserable. He was in love with Shasta, at least as much as he could be in love when he’s stoned all the time, and now she’s gone. She has three pivotal scenes in the movie – the first as she walks back into his life, and gets him to care about something again – her, and the case she has for him. The second, a flashback (brilliantly shot in a single take), during a rainstorm, near the end of their relationship, in which everything seemed so idyllic. The third is the best scene in the movie (again, all in one take, lasting minutes) – as she seduces Doc as she talks about all the ways she has essentially sold out. As the narrator, a groovy chick named Sortilège says, the rot was already there, even in that idyllic flashback, even if Doc never quite knew it. Doc never quite knows anything. He takes a lot of notes during his interviews with people, and the cuts to what he’s writing (“Paranoia alert”, “Something Spanish”) get some of the biggest laughs of the movie.

How have I made Inherent Vice sound so far? Probably like it’s a dark, depressing movie. To be fair, it does touch on some very dark themes – but the surface of the movie is deliriously entertaining. It is a comedy- and often a very funny one. Altman’s Long Goodbye adaptation is one inspiration, but the Coen Brothers The Big Lebowski is another. And since Bridges is now far too old to play Sportello, Anderson cast the next best thing – Joaquin Phoenix, who is asked to do a hell of lot during the course of this movie. He’s playing a classic stoner to be sure but because Anderson shifts tones, sometimes even within scenes, Phoenix has to keep up. He has to be over the top one second, and understated the next. He has to suggest Doc’s positive and negative qualities through a haze of marijuana smoke. If Inherent Vice is The Big Lebowski, than Josh Brolin is John Goodman’s Walter to Phoenix’s The Dude. Again, at first it seems like Brolin is going so playing Bigfoot as very broad at first, but as it moves along there are different moments here. The connection between Doc and Bigfoot is underlined, subtly, by Anderson – and late in the film they apologize to each other like a bickering married couple. Like the connection between Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd in Anderson’s latest film, The Master, their relationship is too complicated to really put into words.

I know that Inherent Vice will frustrate a lot of people. It has so much plot, but isn’t really concerned with it. It takes wild tangents that are seemingly related to nothing – the delirious, cocaine fever dream with Martin Short, so great in such a small role, is an example. The tone switches from slapstick to dark and depressing and back again. In most cases things like this would signal that the director had no idea what he was doing – but here it’s all a part of Anderson’s grand scheme, and it somehow works brilliantly. This is technically the second time Anderson has adapted a novel to the screen – but anyone who has read Upton Sinclair’s Oil knows that There Will Be Blood is pretty much an original screenplay. This time, he faithfully adapts Pynchon – although he changes the ending a little, perhaps to not make it overly depressing, and he follows the tone that Pynchon set. That doesn’t take anything away from Anderson (who the hell else would even try to do this with Pynchon). If you are someone who wants everything to be wrapped up in a neat little package, for a film that goes from point A to point B to point C with no deviations, there are a lot of movies out there you can see. That isn’t what Inherent Vice is. It’s much more than that – and its why it’s one of the very best films of the year, and may just be the film from 2014 I will revisit more than any other, Hell, I wish I could go again right now.