The old question of story and how much we depend on it for cinematic satisfaction
is here again. The familiar three-word write-off “I was bored” often points to
something more provocative than boredom, writes Michael Phillips
I love a good story as much as you do. While the primacy of storytelling in our lives doesn’t explain the popularity of Transform ers: Age of Extinction, the allure of straightforward, absorbing narrative in any medium remains as important as ever,
especially given how much in our popular culture carves up our empathy, our curiosity and our attention spans into smaller and
smaller pieces.
Yet I wonder: With the right movie, does story matter, really?
Several colleagues have mentioned their experience of seeing Boyhood and the restless, itchy reactions of various loved ones
(spouses, children) to writer-director Richard Linklater’s film. Too much life, not enough plot, some say, which may be a code
phrase for a more interesting reaction — just as the familiar three-word write-off “I was bored” often points to something more
provocative than boredom, closer to active frustration.
It’s a long way from Boyhood, but writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice opens in wide release this week, and with
it comes the old question of story and how much we depend on it for cinematic satisfaction. Anderson’s evocative adaptation of
the Thomas Pynchon novel, set in 1970 Los Angeles, will be a divisive number indeed. It practically drools plot, and you know
what? The plot doesn’t really matter.
Pynchon fashioned a detective narrative steeped in the legacy of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, relocated (not far from
where Robert Altman’s 1973 Long Goodbye landed) to a new, eerily blissed-out and disoriented LA, reeling from the Charles Manson
murders. Anderson has folded in as many of Pynchon’s blind alleys and red herrings and heroin-cartel mysteries as he could and
still keep Inherent Vice a tick under the 2-and-a-half hour mark. Many will not go for Inherent Vice. I did, though at various
points in the story, even the story didn’t seem to care much about the story.
Pynchon’s interests, respected and illuminated by one of our greatest contemporary American filmmakers, are all about vast
conspiracies and the way cities run
amok, institutionally and otherwise. The details aren’t important, at least the usual story details.
Detective fiction and film noir have always been about a feeling, not a case. In The Big Sleep (1946), Howard Hawks’ deathless
and absurdly complicated adaptation of the Chandler novel, neither Hawks nor the writers could figure out if a minor character
in the Chandler mystery (the chauffeur) was a murder victim or a suicide, or what. “They sent me a wire,” Chandler later wrote a
friend, after being asked to clarify. “And dammit I didn’t know either.”
Time magazine’s review of the Hawks film, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and enough double-entendres to start an
Entendre of the Month Club, put it nicely: “...for folks who don’t care what is going on, or why, so long as the talk is hard
and the action harder.” The review went on to say the plot’s “nightmare blur is an asset, and only one of many.” I’d say the
same of Inherent Vice, although the blur is mostly a sunshine blur.
In the detective genre, which Pynchon and Anderson exploit, blithely, do we really put plot first? When I think of The Maltese
Falcon, I don’t think about the falcon. I think of the faces of those who are after it, and the looks on the faces of Bogart and
Mary Astor in their not-long goodbye. Plot, I contend, in every genre, can be deployed in the way T.S. Eliot once wrote about
“meaning” in his narrative poems. It’s there, he argued, “to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and
quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice piece of meat for the
house-dog.” Same with plot. It’s the steak you throw over the fence to distract the guard dog while you come up with something
more interesting.
Anyone who reads Pynchon’s Inherent Vice or sees Anderson’s film version for the story is making a big mistake. Though Anderson
erred, I think, in giving his movie an epic length — detective fiction, even Pynchon’s mournful goof, is best when it’s boiled
down and stripped for parts — he got the main thing right. The world of Doc Sportello, the beach shacks, the alarming collisions
of counterculture and Nixonian law and order: These ideas provide images of contrast and beauty, and harsh, sun-lit rot. And
Anderson shoots it all like a waking dream.
One final thought on plot, for which we consult that master of pulp-free fiction, Anton Chekhov. When Chekhov’s plays premiered,
few knew what to make their free-associative, plot-unreliant gatherings of characters. This is why his writing feels so alive
and present and ever-contemporary: There’s no heavy-duty melodramatic plot machinery to date it. David Mamet adapted The Cherry
Orchard and, in a marvelous and instructive essay, wrote about his realisation that the title of Chekhov’s masterpiece is
irrelevant. Nobody in the play gives a rip about the cherry orchard.
“The cherry orchard and its imminent destruction,” wrote Mamet, “is nothing other than an effective dramatic device...Chekhov
has thirteen people stuck in a summer house. He has a lot of brilliant scenes.” He needs to “come up with a pretext which will
keep all thirteen characters in the same place and talking to each other for a while. This is one of the dilemmas of the modern
dramatist: ‘Gosh, this material is fantastic. What can I do to just Keep the People in the House?’”
The Golden Fang cartel in Inherent Vice is the key to everything and it does not matter much. What matters is what happens to
Doc and LA en route to the resolution of the mystery. In Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, do we care about who planted the car bomb?
No. We care about Joseph Calleia as the loyal supplicant, looking out a window, wised up and heartbroken, at Welles’ Hank
Quinlan as the grizzled veteran lawman falls back into the company of his old demons for good. That’s better than plot; that’s
life, dramatized, crystallized. — Chicago Tribune/TNS