Inherent confusion in 'Inherent Vice'

Paul Thomas Anderson tackles a Thomas Pynchon novel and ... well ... er ... that is ...

Director Paul Thomas Anderson has gone where no director has gone before; i.e., he has attempted to bring a novel by the reclusive Thomas Pynchon to the screen.

Those familiar with Pynchon's work immediately will understand why this is such an audacious endeavor on Anderson's part. Pynchon's novels aren't plot-driven, and frequently veer off into clouds of digression as he watches the social order break into bizarre fragments.

If a Pynchon novel doesn't always make sense in conventional terms, well, look around you. What really does?

When I was in college during the '60s, we were all devouring Pynchon's V., a debut novel that revolved around a character named Benny Profane.

Pynchon provided a counterweight to the formalized rigor of academic reading. We were smitten. We congratulated ourselves for getting "it," whatever "it" was.

In Inherent Vice, Anderson dips into Pynchon's 2009 neo-noir fantasy, an LA-based story that introduces us to a character named Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix). Doc's 1970s life unfolds in a pot-induced haze that keeps him wandering through post-Manson, hippie detritus in a fictional town called Gordita Beach.

If the private eye was staple of 1940s Hollywood, he's reduced to blood-shot eye by Anderson, less a savvy guy with his own moral code than a bemused idler.

The movie opens when Sportello is visited by a former girlfriend, the elusive Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston). It seems Shasta Fay has become the lover of real-estate magnate Michael Z. Wolfmann (Eric Roberts).

Wolfmann has disappeared and Shasta Fay wants Sportello's help to locate him, presumably to save him from those who would put him in a sanitarium -- or something like that.

At this point, I'm going to let the ship that's carrying the Anderson/Pynchon plot sink. No more attempts to recount what can't be recounted. The plot is a blur of dodges, gestures and noir mimicry. Trying to follow it is a bit like getting lost in a new town without benefit of a map or GPS. You either panic and scream or you decide to enjoy the strange sights.

For me, these sights are embodied in the form of characters who enter the movie like figures from a pop-up book.

A sampling:

-- Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro). He's Sportello's lawyer, a guy who seems like a refugee from a Hunter Thompson story.

-- Lt. Detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), an LA cop who specializes in civil rights violations.
-- Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short), a dentist who wears purple suits and heads a mysterious ring called Golden Fang.

-- Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a saxophone player who's presumed to have died, but whose wife (Jena Malone) thinks he's still alive.

You can tell by the character names that Pynchon's universe is one of broad comedy carved with a satirist's knife.

I'm putting off my assessment for a bit because (as a matter of public service) I want to share with you the way that I watched the movie.

I tended to drift in and out of the various episodes. While each was unfolding, it held my attention, but as Anderson shifted from one bit to the next, I had difficulty remembering exactly where I'd been.

I enjoyed the music -- both Jonny Greenwood's score and the tunes selected by Anderson to accompany various segments. I chuckled. My mind wandered. I chuckled some more. My mind wandered some more.

When Reese Witherspoon showed up as Deputy DA Penny Kimball, I was amused to see her. She's one of Sportello's sexual companions and informed sources.

I felt a sense of alienated indifference as the characters exchanged information that seemed important to them, but left me shrugging.

The movie's narration -- delivered by Joanna Newsom as a character named Sortilege -- sometimes approaches Pynchon's eloquence, but doesn't necessarily clarify much of anything.

Two performances are of special note. Phoenix, who appeared in Anderson's The Master, brings stoned integrity and his own level of confusion to the role of Sportello.

He's best in scenes in which he squares off with Brolin's Bigfoot, a character who becomes a bold parody of a quintessentially starched Los Angeles detective. Bigfoot has a crew-cut and a fondness for phallus-shaped popsicles. Unashamedly brutal and a man of porcine appetites (he's always eating), Bigfoot stands as a kind of one-man satire of law enforcement at its worst.

Now, what to make of all this?

You can probably tell from the tone of this review that I'm not ready to rip into Anderson's movie. I hope you also can tell that it's an experience to which not everyone will take. The old adage -- it helps if you're stoned -- may be applicable here, an observation I offer not as an encouragement for pot smoking, but as a guidepost to the experience that awaits you.

I enjoyed some of the movie's asides, watching Bigfoot in a non-speaking role in Adam 12, for example. On top of everything else, the guy wants to be on TV. Martin Short made me smile, as did Sportello's visit to a massage parlor in the middle of nowhere.

I'm sure I'm leaving something out. The neo-Nazis who guard Wolfmann perhaps? I'm not sure it matters.

Was a time when I might have gotten more pleasure from this meander through a lost moment in the counterculture moors. I suppose in the end, Anderson didn't totally convince me that Pynchon's work should be brought to the screen, even with the help of the gifted cinematographer Robert Elswit who coats each scene with downside lacquer.

If you're an Anderson fan (and I mostly am), you probably owe it to yourself to give this one a try. If you're a Pynchon fan, you're already used to plots that leave you scratching your head.

Everyone else? I'd say that the movie unfolds as a series of digressions from ... well ... let's talk.

Did I feel hostility toward Inherent Vice? Not really.

Did I like it? Sometimes.

Was I bored by it? Occasionally.

Would I watch it again? Not immediately. Probably someday. Who knows?

Tim Burton's short gets longer

A skimpy but often rewarding Frankenweenie

In Frankenweenie, director Tim Burton makes his 1984 short film of the same name longer. Although the result can feel a bit undernourished, Frankenweenie definitely has some splendid moments, many of them a trifle macabre.

Shooting in comforting black and white and skillfully employing the techniques of stop-action animation, Burton tells a story based on familiar horror tropes that he gathers like weird flowers placed into an oddly shaped bouquet.

The story introduces us to Victor Frankenstein (voice by Charlie Tahan), a boy who's having difficulty accepting the loss of his beloved dog Sparky, a happy but hapless pooch that fell victim to an on-coming car.

As it turns out, Victor has an inventive streak, not to mention an attic full of contraptions that look as if they were lifted from the set of any number of low-rent, 50s sci-fi movies.

What's a grieving boy to do? In a Tim Burton movie, he heads to the pet cemetery to dig up poor Sparky, and -- thanks to the revivifying power of lightning -- he reanimates his dearly departed four-legged companion.

Victor learned about the amazing powers of electricity from Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau), a substitute science teacher with a slightly ghoulish voice and Transylvanian accent.

To add complexity, Victor and some of his classmates also are competing in their school's science fair. This leads to a wholesale series of reanimations that wreak havoc on the town of New Holland, allowing Burton to bring creature-feature flare to the proceedings.

A giant mutant turtle tramples its way through town in Godzilla-like fashion. A prissy pet cat transforms into a creature that looks like a terrifying cross between a bat and a cat. Sea-monkeys proliferate, creating rampage-like chaos.

All of this because a toothless outcast kid named Edgar 'E' Gore (Atticus Shaffer) connives to use Victor's secrets to his own advantage, pointing the way toward one of the movie's more didactically expressed lessons.

Pay attention here, kids: Whether science is used for good or ill depends on who's doing the using.

Additional voices include Martin Short and Catherine O'Hara as Victor's mom and dad. Winona Ryder voices a girl who's staying with her uncle the mayor, who lives next door to Victor and frets about dogs that trample his flowers.

Burton knows how to create visual magic, and he's proven himself adept at playing with pop culture in ways that are clever and sometimes darkly funny. In this case, he's recycling the conceits of 1930s Frankenstein movies, right down to the bolts in Sparky's neck. They're used to attract the electric current that brings the poor pooch back to life.

My only real complaint about Frankenweenie involves its ending. For a time, I thought that Burton was going to have some fun and then show us how a child can come to grips with a devastating loss, but the movie's ending cops out on a difficult truth and keeps Frankenweenie from saying something that really could have been helpful to kids.

Parents should know that kids who have a less offbeat sense of humor than Burton may find the movie a bit disturbing. I appreciated the stylishness of Frankenweenie, and give Burton credit for being interested in the kind of antique horror that can seem almost quaint -- at least in these days of graphically splashed violence and gore.

If I really were going to push another point, I might say that it's past time for Burton to stop trying to reanimate the playthings he finds in his pop-cultural toy chest. But I'll leave that for another day.