REVIEW: Inherent Vice (2015)

It is difficult to briefly scan over my review for The Master, first, having since written an article on Party Girl and the more negative effects of the auteur theory on film culture and, second, having since seen Inherent Vice. My review for The Master equates that film’s qualities almost entirely with those of its director, Paul Thomas Anderson, while my article on the auteur theory suggests that the director should not be the only reason we watch and/ or praise a film. This contradiction leads me to my present difficulty reviewing Inherent Vice – the film itself isn’t any good and yet many of its flaws would seem to be entirely down to its director. It leaves me with little room to manoeuvre – between trying not to focus too much on the director and their previous work and blaming Anderson almost entirely because of the lack of control displayed here. Some films, it seems, are more easily addressed via an oeuvre than others, which could be why Party Girl gets more acclaim for the qualities of its director than for the qualities of the film itself. Maybe one can only properly consider the works of a filmmaker when that filmmaker has made his last film or, worse, has stopped experimenting.

Leaving that conundrum aside (I’m sure it wasn’t a particularly interesting one) and moving on to Inherent Vice – first, I would like to say without condescension that I feel it is a good thing for a filmmaker to be experimenting with new ways of making films. Who wants a Paul Thomas Anderson film as bored and safe as Magic in the Moonlight? An experiment that doesn’t pay off will not be as rewarding, but surely it will be different enough to inspire some kind of thought or reaction. In theory, it should as long as the experimentation is due to something more than just mere style.

Inherent Vice is two-and-a-half hours and I felt left out within the first ten minutes. The film is a mess and it seems that this may have been intentional. The film is intentionally vague. The plot is intentionally incomprehensible. A lot of the dialogue is intentionally inaudible. The characters are mostly unlikeable and fairly one-note. The film’s themes are not particularly profound and are not addressed with any depth. The film, then, is pointless and seemingly proud of it. The apparent intention of the film is to be a mood piece that wanders and rambles, mourns the 1970s and introduces you to interesting, colourful people and waxes lyrically and beautifully to some nice vintage music. None of this is particularly off-putting – indeed the brilliant The Long Goodbye manages it, as does the OK The Big Lebowski, the repetition of whose cult following seems to be this film’s raison d’etre. But Inherent Vice does not succeed here in any shape or form. The characters are not interesting; the settings are not particularly memorable. The film isn’t sad or funny, but bland. It is a mood piece that doesn’t create any moods. It tries too hard to be unique and forgets to allow its audience to be emotionally or intellectually invested. It is too pretentious to be likable and too stupid, too shallow to be thought provoking.

And that is really it. As I said, the film is two-and-a-half hours and it does nothing with its running time. There have been a few critics who have tried to make claims that the film’s flaws and cock-ups are actually qualities – the one of the silliest is Jonathan Romney’s attempt (in last month’s Sight and Sound) to praise the film’s use of the human voice is an instrument for music rather than communication, as well as his attempt to address the film’s apparent influence from 1960s Playboy magazines. There have also been many who find the film’s world dense and fascinating and exciting and its tone moving but, and I need to be personal here, I don’t agree. There is nothing immersive about Inherent Vice; I did not see enough of interest in the characters and the set pieces to keep boredom at bay.

Paul Thomas Anderson, his crew and his cast have produced something unfocussed and lazy and there is nothing in it to fool those looking for art in it. And that’s it. This review may be as incoherent or as badly thought-out as Inherent Vice, but at least it does have a point.

REVIEW: Her (2014)

By a bizarre coincidence, I recently saw two films that sought to replay the typical tropes of the romantic film formula (loneliness, awkward first meeting, developing relationship, break-up and reconciliation) with a somewhat subversive edge. The first was reasonably funny and the second was, initially, reasonably intriguing, but neither proved particularly interesting. The first was 2009’s I Love You, Man, a film about the developing friendship between two men (Paul Rudd and Jason Segel) and the second film was Her.

Her is set in what is clearly supposed to be the not so distant future (although the film tries its best to undercut any science fiction feel the setting might generate). Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a lonely guy, in the middle of a divorce, looking for love. He writes love letters for people who can no longer be bothered to write them for themselves – only one of the film many representations of a future in which the communicative potential of the internet and other technologies is used to mediate between human relationships. After his friend Amy (Amy Adams) sets him up with a blind date (Olivia Wilde), which doesn’t go well, Theodore finds what he is looking for in a new advancement in computer software, the OS or operating system. Called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), Theodore of course choosing the female voice option, it is an artificially intelligent piece of software that can learn new ideas and emotions by getting to know its human master. It also manages his affairs, sorting his emails and keeping an eye on his schedule and such. Theodore and Samantha soon fall in love.

The comparison above is mainly unhelpful (and probably used primarily as a snappy opening, especially considering the first four words), but it may represent in some small way the problem with Her. I Love You, Man was a comedy that attempted to mock the typical formula of the romance film (a formula that most other contemporary comedies stick to much too closely) by a slight shift in the gender roles – Rudd taking the man’s role and Segel the woman’s. Though not a great film, it passed the time. Her, on the other hand, has a science-fiction premise, which can be clearly read as a comment on the way we use technology today. As such, it can at times be rather depressing and creepy, in its scenes of people passing each other by while wrapped up in conversations with their OSs and in how lucid and penetrating these OSs can be. But where it blunders is by representing the relationship between man and machine in so typical a romance storyline. Initially, the film is not without interest, but its refusal to judge or moralise, though valuable in itself, makes it a rather vague and meaningless one.

In a bizarre spin on Woody Allen’s ‘whatever works’ mantra, Her seems to be suggesting that humans and machines can have fulfilling, if temporary, relationships. It seems to be saying that our fascination and increasing reliance on technology and the steps forward being made in artificial intelligence may lead to some pretty freaky human-machine relationships…but that’s OK. And despite its science fiction premise and its muted futuristic setting, Her is, at heart, a fairly typical romance film, tightly aligned to the above formula – although, being a high-minded film, the relationship does not quite work out at the end. In the end, Theodore rebounds predictably into a relationship with Amy. So, in other words, human-machine romances may be the future…but probably not.

Her, in the end, doesn’t have much to say about anything. It gestures at ideas – when all of the OSs band together at the end of the film, the film seems to be suggesting a coming apocalypse, though this turns out to be merely unintentional. The film comfortably muses at length on such overdone topics as what it is to be alive and the difficult of maintaining romantic relationships and how people grow without saying anything new. Instead of real philosophical depth or insight, we have a relationship in which two people talk about philosophical depth and insight without ever imparting any of it. The film suggests that the OSs will continue to grow after we are gone…fair enough but who cares? By way of a conclusion, it has Theodore and Amy go to the top of their building and tearfully contemplate the sky while the awful indie movie soundtrack swells.

Her is ultimately an overlong romance film with a gimmick and a badge of indie credibility where it should have innovations or ideas. Unsurprising, really, since most of Spike Jonze’s cinema is more about gimmicks than ideas – for instance, Adaptation is about the difficulty and torture of the creative process, especially in an art form as commodified as that of the Hollywood film, but it is mainly about making meta jokes. Her is not unlike a Hollywood film itself - vacuous, hokey, uninteresting, emotionally false and, dare I say it, boring as hell.

REVIEW: The Master (2012)

Is there much point in mentioning that The Master has divided audiences and that it is the long-awaited new film from a writer-director who has previously offered some of the best films of 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2007? Much better to merely say what one thinks it is all about.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, a recent WWII veteran in 1950 who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to return to real life, Freddie jumps onto a yacht and stows away. He is suddenly introduced to the ship’s commander, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a “writer, doctor, nuclear physicist theoretical philosopher” and the man behind “The Cause”, a pseudo-religion that he has doctored up and is touring around the country to promote. Quell is quick to fall under Dodd’s wing, but how will he react when the indoctrination begins?

The links between the film and the life of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology have been emphasised enough. The Master has its filmic antecedents in John Huston and Orson Welles – two big filmmaking personalities who excelled in 1940s Hollywood, but who also excelled in more outré films in the 1970s. John Huston gleefully played the repellent Noah Cross in Chinatown, a role that could also have inspired Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. Huston’s very strange Wise Blood is also worth mentioning with its links between charlatans and religion. As for Orson Welles, one needs only to have seen his fantastic, mesmerizing F For Fake in order to be able to draw a lineage from the character Orson Welles presents himself as there to the character that Lancaster Dodd almost perfectly embodies – apart from when he is challenged and the whole brilliant façade crumbles into the very lack of restraint and animalism that he so detests. All that having been said, however, one film that exerts a most palpable influence on The Master is Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous, There Will Be Blood. The hype surrounding that film, as well as its own high quality, must have made it a tough one to top and The Master is almost self-consciously similar. One scene, in which Quell and Dodd go off in search of Dodd’s hidden manuscript in a rocky desert, can’t help but bring to mind the similarly harsh setting of There Will Be Blood. Jonny Greenwood’s score is equally an attempt to re-do what he did so well on the previous film. They work well as companion pieces with There Will Be Blood a look at greed and The Master a look at fakery, albeit with less of an emphasis on the perpetrator.

As in There Will Be Blood, the performances take centre stage with much of the film focussing on Joaquin Phoenix’s fantastically driven performance as a traumatized war veteran in search of a family. The film does go some way to revealing how, in the wake of the end of the war and with the influx of damaged veterans back into normal life, that dissatisfaction and isolation grew and a demand rose for such things as The Cause. Philip Seymour Hoffman is equally good as a man whose rampant knack for self-promotion has found him at the head of a movement, the intricacies of which he himself can be caught out on. Initiation into The Cause is marked by a deadening sadism, entrants are harangued into submission by endless repetition of utterly meaningless actions until a personality much stronger than their own tells them to stop as they have discovered the truth. Bewilderment and belief are intertwined irreparably so that when Quell finally sees Dodd for the charlatan that he is (in a scene that is remarkable for the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality of the exposition), the first thing that he does is half-heartedly beat up a fellow sceptic before he sits down and starts to cry. Though the film makes clear that The Cause did help Quell for a brief period of time and that more from the sense of belonging that the community gave him than the teachings themselves, the teachings of The Cause are both Quell’s entry and exit from the cult. The film concludes brilliantly with Quell performing a “processing” of his own (that being the questioning which is intended to bring out the true self of the subject and the beginning of their initiation into The Cause), though whether he is in fact becoming a second Dodd or is merely amusing himself, incredulous at how he had previously been taken in, the film refuses to say.

The film is not an easy watch and will probably have as many detractors as it will have supporters. There are too few challenging films that are as widely available and even fewer that are made with such confidence and artistry. Much of the joy of the film is in merely allowing yourself to be taken wherever the film and Anderson want to go, with many scenes being all about the performances and others being pleasingly confounding, safe in the knowledge that you are in the hands of a filmmaker who knows what he is doing. The Master is not as good as Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, maybe because cults and charlatanism is not as interesting as, respectively, loneliness and greed. However, Paul Thomas Anderson has managed to move away from the sometimes too-obvious influence of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman and has become a rather unique voice in American independent cinema and is probably the only one of that rather hit-and-miss Sundance group not to do a film that could wholly be discounted from his filmography – Alexander Payne aside.

The Master rewards attention and intellectual investment, as well as, of course, emotional investment. There are a lot of things that the film leaves unanswered and an attentive audience can leave the screening with a lot to talk about. Indeed, this review might well be amended, if not entirely renounced, in the coming weeks – just as it took several weeks and a second viewing before There Will Be Blood came together. That said, The Master is a difficult film to recommend as it is entirely up to each individual’s predilection for unconventional and challenging cinema and those intrigued enough have probably already seen it by now. Ultimately, The Master is a difficult film to wholeheartedly like but as an example of how invigorating and rich cinema can still be, it is unsurpassed so far this year – This Is Not A Film maybe being the sole exception.