Robots At The Movies:
“INHERENT VICE” IS UNOFFICIALLY AN INCOHERENT SPLICE
As we sat in the darkness waiting for our movie to start, I said to my girlfriend, “Get ready to have your mind blown.” And really, I meant it, because Paul Thomas Anderson not only writes and directs the kinds of movies that make me want to get back into the film industry, but this guy demonstrates real vision, true character, solid wit and rock hard guts. I feel like I understand him – or that I know him – because his ability to weave his art into my soul makes me shudder, like every time I hear Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged live version of “All Apologies.”
I truly have treasured Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies. “There Will Be Blood” is so damn good that it makes me want to become a mean-ass, oil tycoon and beat up on bullshit, hypocritical preachers. “Boogie Nights” tempted me to not only direct and star in 70’s porn, but then sell everything off and move to South America before the world turned into a bummer. And “Magnolia” brings me hope when I feel like I can’t bear to lose anything more in this broken world of despair and decay. Even “The Master” makes me laugh at my inner, darker self – when I’m at my craziest and most insecure. But the only thing “Inherent Vice” made me want to do is hang out on the couch next to Joaquin Phoenix, smoking joint after joint, maybe order a ton of Chinese take out, and hope that he or anyone narrating could somewhere in the fog possibly make some sense of this film for me, before I totally pass out in a heap on the shag carpet floor.
I actually said it out loud, “Why would he make this movie?!” I just couldn’t get it. After a couple hours, it felt like it just kept going and going (like in “Funny Farm” when Chevy Chase’s wife is forced to read his terrible manuscript, she ends up in tears, he freaks out on her and throws the damn thing in the fireplace.) Even “Pink Floyd The Wall” is more cohesive than “Inherent Vice.” “Memento,” “Inception,” or even “Groundhog’s Day” are simple Tic-tac-toe grids compared to this Rubik’s cube conundrum. And then I kept missing lines of dialogue and thinking about Owen Wilson’s nose. During one scene, I though about how great Reese and Joaquin were in “Walk The Line.” And in another how much I liked Josh Brolin in “W.” The way he eats loud and messy, like he’s chewing through a beer bottle, referring to Craig T. Nelson as his ‘Poppy’ at the outdoor Texas barbeque when Elizabeth Banks calls him a ‘devil in a white hat…’
Dude! I’ve read (and critiqued) a lot of bad poetry (and some incredible stuff!), but most of it has one thing in common: the ‘author’ is the only one in on the joke. Here’s the deal – if no one else knows what you’re talking about, and you can’t successfully bring them into your world, people start looking at their cell phones and constantly checking the time until you ultimately just stop telling your boring story, then that’s when (shrugging your shoulders) you say “I guess you just had to be there” and everyone walks away thinking about how to make a better decision next time. And yes, ladies and gentlemen – that should also be in Owen Wilson’s dialogue.
So how did I get this movie pick so wrong? Why am I sitting in a movie theater having negative thoughts? Why?! Maybe it’s because this movie is such a determined adaptation of a psychotropic book, and that I only found that out in the credits and from reading other movie reviews. So here’s another suggestion: if the movie is going to be about this weird, abstract and hard to follow original work, just go ahead and also have Owen Wilson’s character tell Joaquin that there’s this crazy, jacked-up book that got made into a movie starring lots of great people and yet nobody went to go see it in the theater because it doesn’t really follow a plot. Yes, our theater was virtually empty. Even ‘The Interview’ had a larger audience, and that was WITH the threat of being personally injured due to the possibility of a retaliation from North Korea.
Listen, I prefer movies that get bad reviews, because I don’t trust the opinion of the average film critic. Which means I like it a lot when other people don’t show up to the theater. As far as I’m concerned, I was glad it was empty. More for me. But near the end of the film, I realized how lucky everybody else was for not showing up, and that if there is a joke, it was on me, sitting there until the end, wishing to God Owen Wilson had turned to face the camera, telling me to go home and read the book first.
A coon’s age ago, I once sat in a Literature & Film class and studied the appreciation of books and film as stand alone works. Stories like “The Shining” will always be different on the page versus the screen (and there’s a kajillion other better examples). And that if you want to read a book before you go to the movies, that’s great. But if you want to see the book exactly, pick up a camera and shoot it yourself. I want to believe my grasp and enjoyment of a story does not heavily rely on needing to fully know one to appreciate the other. In my younger years, I also secretly devoured “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson. And much later on after the movie came out, I thought they did a pretty great job of translating that crazy story onto the big screen – but I still felt that gnawing curiosity of wondering what it would be like if I had never read the book…
“Where The Buffalo Roam,” “Naked Lunch,” “The Big Lebowski,” “A Clockwork Orange” – these are all movies that are very trippy. And whether they are based on books or not (which they are), you don’t have to read the book to enjoy the movie. And you shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t even be writing this. I should’ve enjoyed the movie, contemplated the mystifying intricacies of life, relished in what a genius Paul Thomas Anderson is, and then gone to bed. But none of that happened. I was experiencing a serious case of plot withdrawal. I stayed up, searching for it, and when I couldn’t find it on my own, I was ready to hire a detective to go looking for it. But maybe not a beach hippie this time…
“Lost” is my favorite TV series, so I like an unspecified amount of confusion with my chaos. But “Inherent Vice” is so inherently confusing, that I can only say, don’t go see it, unless Charlie Kaufman scripts and films have already become just a little too mundane and predictable in your life. Good luck out there. Maybe Terminator 5 isn’t as lame as it looks.