The first trailer has arrived for Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film Inherent Vice, and it’s immediately clear that it’s a huge tonal shift from his previous film The Master.
Each stars Joaquin Phoenix, but where in the previous film the actor played a brooding man desperate for human and spiritual connection, here he’s quite the opposite: affable private detective Larry Sportello, getting drawn into a fractious love rectangle by an old flame. Anderson adapted Inherent Vice from the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, and it looks to have the writer’s “humour... craziness and thoughtfulness”, as the director has put it.
Shot on gorgeously grainy filmstock and set in 1970, making it look like something by Antonioni or the New Hollywood movement, it features a parade of bit parts from Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson and, narrating the trailer, musician Joanna Newsom in her first film role. Josh Brolin, playing Sportello’s LAPD nemesis, looks like he could steal the show with a laugh-out-loud bit of colour shown off here.
Anderson described the feeling of adapting Pynchon’s book as “fun... like taking your dad’s car for a ride,” and “like somebody dumped bags of gold in front of me and I can only take so much with me”; Brolin called the shoot “just absolute fucking chaos every day”. That sense of cheek and energy seems to be all there. Like American Hustle, another madcap 70s period piece which it somewhat resembles, it could be a shoo-in for major awards come 2015.
Pynchon himself might have a cameo in the film, of one sort or another. When quizzed by the New York Times about whether the author would appear, Anderson said that he was “staying out of it” and wouldn’t confirm or deny the role. But Brolin said that “he came on [set] as the kind of mercurial iconoclast he is. He stayed in the corner.” The novelist shies from the limelight, refusing interviews and appearances – though did voice himself on two episodes of the Simpsons, describing Homer Simpson as his “role model”. He also was reported to have done the voiceover on the trailer for the Inherent Vice novel.
Inherent Vice is premiered at the New York film festival on 4 October.
