"Paul Thomas Anderson called himself "a gigantic Pynchon fan": "I'd long had this dance in my mind where I'd be thinking about doing Vineland or Mason & Dixon. But those would have been impossible tasks." No screen version of this elusive, idiosyncratic author's work would be an easy lift, but Inherent Vice is at least a relatively short book that, for all its wild plot convolutions, at heart comes down to a neo-noir detective yarn about a gumshoe looking for his girl."
"Sometimes when a veteran filmmaker finally gets around to making a project that they've dreamed of doing for decades, the resulting film can be an overcooked mess, all that time spent inside its creator's brain leaving it a jumble of incoherent if fascinating ideas. (A recent example that springs to mind is Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis.) But there are other, rarer occasions when a long-evolving project gets exactly the time in the oven that it needed."
Long-gestating film projects can become overcooked, producing incoherent but fascinating results when decades of a creator's private ideas are forced onto the screen. Rare projects gain from extended development and proper timing, emerging successfully after filmmakers accumulate cross-genre experience, industry recognition, large budgets, desirable actors, and trusted collaborators. Paul Thomas Anderson identified as a devoted Pynchon fan and noted that sprawling novels like Vineland or Mason & Dixon would be nearly impossible to adapt. Inherent Vice functions as a relatively short neo-noir detective yarn, while Pynchon's larger works cultivate satirical, absurdist universes and prose that induces confusion, paranoia, and laughter.
Read at Slate Magazine
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