Inherent Vice is also a Pynchon novel that by all accounts is just as indigestible. I wouldn’t know because there’s no way I’m going to track down a copy and attempt to read it.
But for that very reason I was intensely curious to find out how a Pynchon novel could translate to the large screen. I’m also a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007 and the first film I reviewed for the SSH) and The Master (2012) are all intelligent, rich in depth and character and interesting.
So, perhaps unsurprisingly, Inherent Vice was all of the above – absurdly detailed, ridiculously complex, intelligent, rich in depth and character and interesting.
I was also tempted to leave half way through. The sudden appearance and disappearance of characters was doing my head in. The storyline was disjointed. Scenes appeared almost randomly and bore no relationship to the plot other than to progress some other scene somewhere else that was also incongruous. Even the ending just begged more questions than it answered.
Maybe if you read the novel it would all make sense. But I doubt it.
