![]() With a cast led by Joaquin Phoenix and including Josh Brolin as Bjornsen, Benicio del Toro as a likable lawyer, Owen Wilson as a musician turned informer and Reese Witherspoon as a deputy DA who is Sportello’s occasional squeeze, the film follows the novel’s plot devotedly even its most perplexing feature, the Golden Fang – at once a real ship and a suspected conspiracy the private eye uncovers that seems to encompass heroin trafficking, the sex trade, property development, unscrupulous psychiatrists and dentists, rogue elements in the LAPD and FBI, and neo-Nazis – is reproduced in all its bemusing detail (Anderson apparently told his cast to see it as a metaphor, “a catchall for everybody’s paranoia”).Īs Sportello seeks to rescue Wilson’s sax player from the Golden Fang’s clutches as well as trace Wolfmann, Pynchon’s exotically named Californian oddballs, screwball comic dialogue and zany plot twists - even every move in the book’s climactic fight scene - are lovingly transposed to the screen though the film’s second half all but edits out a third missing person investigation that takes Doc to Las Vegas, and reworks the ending. That its hero idolises a by now almost-forgotten movie idol is not reflected in Paul Thomas Anderson’s screenplay, but that’s one of only a handful of respects in which his adaptation is unfaithful to the text. Popping up throughout is swaggering, outlandish LAPD detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, a self-styled “renaissance cop”, who also acts in commercials and television police shows and dreams of writing and starring in a TV movie about one of his own crime-busting feats. It begins with a film actor, Sportello’s ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth, initiating the first of his many interlocking investigations by asking him to find her missing lover, construction tycoon Mickey Wolfmann. Inherent Vice is set in 1970 in Gordita Beach, a fictional, hippie-friendly Los Angeles suburb based on Manhattan Beach and so less than 20 miles from Hollywood. Forty years later in Bleeding Edge, located in Manhattan before and after 9/11, the nods to classic foreign films have gone - reflecting a wider shift away from referencing, and trying to rival, high points of highbrow culture in his later novels -, but its heroine Maxine Tarnow and her family are just as addicted to screen fiction as their earlier counterparts and it continues (if only because they still imitate characters played by stars such as Grace Kelly or even Jennifer Aniston) to shape lives and destinies, often comically but sometimes sinisterly. Movie envy is especially marked in the vast, V2 rocket-fixated Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), set in London and Germany in 1944-45, and where Pynchon displays equal familiarity with German expressionist cinema, the oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl and a host of 30s and 40s Hollywood films, among them The Wizard of Oz and Tod Browning’s Dracula and Freaks. And now Pynchon’s 2009 crime novel Inherent Vice – a mixture of noir and narcotics helpfully centred, like Cosmopolis, on one person, Californian private detective Doc Sportello – has become the first of his works to be filmed. David Cronenberg’s version of DeLillo’s novella Cosmopolis was released in 2012, the same year that The Simpsons reworked a Foster Wallace non-fiction account of a cruise. A movie of the younger novelist’s short story collection Brief Interviews premiered at Sundance in 2009. It was after Foster Wallace’s death in 2008, and with the near-contemporaries DeLillo and Pynchon entering their late 70s, that the first tentative screen adaptations started to appear. ![]() Works such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Don DeLillo’s Underworld and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest were evidently too monstrous and opaque, and had too many strands, characters and locations, to be processed but the writers’ shorter and less complicated novels (Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, for example, or DeLillo’s White Noise) were also overlooked – their idiosyncratic, unpitchable stories were apparently not ones even arthouse directors wanted to tell. U ntil very recently, cinema and television completely shunned the postmodernist authors known for their gargantuan and elaborate takes on the Great American Novel.
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