Paul Thomas Anderson’s Thomas Pynchon adaptation is a stoned private-eye film that refuses to add up, and after an hour we stopped asking it to. Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin are funny, Robert Elswit’s light is lovely, and the plot is lost on purpose. Bring patience.
It is 1970 in Gordita Beach, on the Los Angeles coast, and Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is a private investigator with a brass plate on the door saying he is a doctor. His ex, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), turns up and asks a favour: her new lover, a property developer, is about to be put away by his wife. Within a day Doc has a lump on his head and a dead man beside him, and Paul Thomas Anderson, adapting Thomas Pynchon’s novel, has made it plain he will not help us keep count. We gave up at around the hour mark and we think the film is good: worth an evening if you can treat 149 minutes of not knowing what is going on as weather rather than fault.
Anderson is working the line of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye: the private eye as the last man in town who thinks somebody owes somebody an explanation. Doc is kind, slow and usually right, and Phoenix plays him as a man whose face reaches a thought a beat after the rest of him. He writes “paranoia alert” in his notebook, and “not hallucinating”. It is a quieter performance than the sideburns suggest.
Josh Brolin’s Bigfoot Bjornsen, a flat-topped detective who kicks in Doc’s door and moonlights in television adverts, is the best thing in it. Brolin plays him as a man made of grievances: against hippies, against his own department, against the pancakes he orders by shouting in Japanese. We laughed harder at him eating a chocolate-covered frozen banana than at anything in a comedy in months. He and Doc are the film’s one steady relationship. They despise each other and keep turning up.
Robert Elswit’s images look sun-faded, like a photograph left on a dashboard. The light comes in low and gold through blinds and smog, and conversations are held in long takes that creep slowly towards the faces. David Crank’s rooms are particular: Doc’s beach shack, a massage parlour with lunch specials, an office tower shaped like a fang. Mark Bridges keeps Doc in sandals and corduroy and Bigfoot in a suit a size too small.
Jonny Greenwood’s score is mostly strings, slow and slightly seasick, and it leaves room for records. Joanna Newsom, as Sortilège, narrates in Pynchon’s own sentences, and her high, unbothered voice is the nearest thing the film has to a map. Leslie Jones cuts without the usual detective-film courtesies. Scenes end when the people in them stop talking, not when the plot has been served, which is why the film is confusing and why it feels like a place rather than a story.
The scene that got us is a memory. Doc and Shasta run through a downpour to an address a Ouija board has given them, and stand in the rain laughing. Elswit shoots it from across the street in grey light, Neil Young sings on the soundtrack, and nothing happens. It moved us more than anything in the plot, because for a minute the film stops being about who is working for whom and becomes about a man who misses a woman and knows that year has gone.
What does not work is the pile-up. Owen Wilson’s Coy Harlingen, a saxophonist everyone says is dead; Benicio del Toro’s maritime lawyer Sauncho Smilax; Reese Witherspoon’s Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball; Hong Chau’s Jade. All of them are good and most are gone before you have placed them. In the second hour we were bored, then irritated, less by the confusion than by the feeling that Anderson had decided confusion was the point and could coast on it. Waterston gets one long late scene we will not describe that is the frankest thing Anderson has filmed, and some viewers will lose patience there.
Set against There Will Be Blood or The Master it is a smaller thing, and knows it, closer to a long afternoon with a book Anderson loves and does not want to finish. Watch it at home with the subtitles on. A third of the plot is in mumbled asides, and you will want to go back for the pancakes.
