For all its sun, California has never lacked for shadows. Before their books were made into genre-defining films, writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett — authors who essentially invented hard-boiled detective fiction with books like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon — were poking and prodding at the sometimes flimsy facade of West Coast airiness. Beneath it they found a rich and roiling underbelly of deceit and greed fueled by the opportunism that drove so many to California in the first place — but in Chandler and Hammett’s stories, that once hopeful feeling had curdled.
In film, that sense of paradise lost is never so richly felt as it is in stories about Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley (any story set in L.A. is immediately also about L.A., so strong is the city’s character). And while there are some films that turn a keen focus on a particular aspect of the place — see any number of movies about the film industry and/or spoiled high-schoolers — it has often been the L.A. Noir (a sunnier noir that can encompass films like Michael Mann’s cops-and-robbers flick Heat) that has best taken the pulse of the place. Consider some of the greats: films like Chinatown and Sunset Boulevard, up through the neo-noir of L.A. Confidential and the comedic noir of The Big Lebowski, as well as the noir future of Blade Runner.
This week, Paul Thomas Anderson adds a bit more to the city’s legend with Inherent Vice, his new film set at the tail end of the 1960s love train. Based on a novel by Thomas Pynchon — a wildly kaleidoscopic writer whose novels are generally considered unfilmable — Anderson’s new film adds to his already impressive Los Angeles oeuvre, made up of work including Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, and Magnolia.
In this new work, Joaquin Phoenix stars as the reefer-mad private eye “Doc” Sportello, whose working methods are very much of the era (keep an eye on his notepad). Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterson) shows up on his doorstep one day with an odd request: would he help her stop her current boyfriend’s wife (and the wife’s lover, since it’s L.A.) from getting boyfriend Mickey committed to an asylum?
In Anderson’s world, that request is just the match strike that sets off a long string of sparks. He has a lot of help putting on the show: Vice’s cast includes Benicio Del Toro and Owen Wilson, as well as a sparkling Martin Short as a cocaine-fueled dentist and a thick-set Josh Brolin as a cop who disapproves of Sportello’s methods. It is, in the end, a sprawling, sometimes unraveled affair, but like so many of both Anderson’s and Pynchon’s works — and like Los Angeles herself — the beauty of it isn’t revealed until you jump in, crash through the surface, and live for a little bit in the murkier layers below.
Also this week: Two classic fairy tales get big screen showings at area theaters. On Saturday, Amherst Cinema will screen The Princess Bride in a 10 a.m. show. Rob Reiner’s 1987 film takes one of our oldest stories — the damsel in distress — and makes it seem both new and timeless all at once. There are very few perfect movies, but The Princess Bride comes awfully close. If you haven’t seen this film, you must. And if you have seen it, then you’ll know that seeing it in a theater is a rare opportunity. Take this one while you can.
The next day (with a Wednesday encore), Cinemark Theaters in Hadley will screen The Wizard of Oz. I won’t bother to summarize the plot here, except to quote Rick Polito’s infamous 1998 summary: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.” Film nerds, however, will be excited to hear about a different detail that might make this screening unusual even for Wizard fans: the film will be presented in the same aspect ratio as the original 1939 release.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
