When I heard in the summer of 2023 that Paul Thomas Anderson was not only in production on a new film, but a Pynchon adaptation starring Leo DiCaprio, I was beside myself with excitement. PTA was a man whose work I had grown to revere as well as respect, and I was beginning to consider him one of the great American filmmakers, not just of his generation, but of all time. He had both outlasted and outperformed his early contemporaries, seeming to refine his craft more and more as the years went by, with the films of his more stoic and docile 40s and 50s seeming to artistically circumvent the loud, raucous, coke-addled filmography that once launched this young auteur into Hollywood royalty back in the ’90s and early 2000s. As a matter of fact, my favorite of his (and one of my favorites of all time) comes from this very same resurgence throughout the 2010s.
“Inherent Vice” (2014) is a near-direct adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, published just five years prior. This was the very first novel of Pynchon’s then 50-year career to ever be adapted to the big screen, and fans of the man are not necessarily surprised by this. Despite functioning as a literary giant for more than half a century, much of old Tommy P’s bibliography is elusive, dense and deliberately obfuscating. I’d imagine trying to adapt “Gravity’s Rainbow” into a coherent Hollywood screenplay would be a lot like trying to solve a 40×40 Rubik’s Cube while falling down thirty stories of stairs. And the same surrealist incoherence that has constrained Pynchon from ever being a household name began to plague “Inherent Vice”’s box office upon release.
With this in mind, I was equal parts shocked and delighted that Anderson’s first feature (fronting DiCaprio nevertheless) since 2021’s “Licorice Pizza” (don’t get me started) was going to be a loose adaptation of “Vineland”, not only Pynchon’s best novel, but a prophetic lament of an age of waning hope that seemed to grow more and more relevant as the days drew on.
As trailers and teasers were revealed, it seemed like PTA was veering on the looser end of the adaptational spectrum, as opposed to “Inherent Vice”’s near 1:1 match — PTA actually wrote a 398-page sentence-to-sentence match screenplay originally for IV before trimming it down. I began to grow cautiously optimistic about the film’s faithfulness to the text, especially following a disastrous marketing campaign. How could a billion-dollar studio truly capture the essence of a revolutionary satire set in post-Reagan era America?
I’ve seen it three separate times now, and the only thing that has remained constant in those three viewings was how different I felt about it every time. The very first thing I recognized, not 30 minutes into my first viewing, is that “OBAA” and “Vineland” are two very disparate pieces. Their plots are loosely similar, and the main cast is relatively matched (Bob is Zoyd, Perfidia is Frenesi, Willa is Prairie, Lockjaw is Vond, and so on), but they are worlds apart characteristically.
OBAA is a contemporary tale, one that is aptly cognizant of modern America’s plights and perils, yet remains hopeful in spite of these. “Vineland” is set in the midst of the Reagan-era ’80s, dwelling on the growing police state and the fates left for the now lost revolutionaries of the ’60s. It is cynical and absurd, and not necessarily optimistic for the fate of our country. While I cannot deny how cathartically beautiful it is to witness a master at his craft still kicking it, now at the highest level, some 35 years later, I think OBAA will ultimately endure as a great PTA flick, not a great Pynchon adaptation.
They’re too ideologically separate (for better or for worse, I think the latter) to exist in the wonderful harmony he found more than a decade ago with “Inherent Vice”. Unfortunately, the film’s production is clouded with ethical concerns that almost pose it as antithetical to the crux of the original text. Alana Haim and soundtracker Johnny Greenwood (of Radiohead fame)’s ardent Zionism and the displacement of homeless bodies for the massive set we see in the opening act leave a foul taste in my mouth. These ideological contradictions begin to dilute the thesis of an unapologetically leftist film to the point where I can’t help but wonder if PTA missed the forest for the trees in his iteration of “Vineland”. It’s still fantastic, don’t get me wrong, and if I lived in ignorant bliss without having read “Vineland” first, I might call it the best film of a director who is making his case to be the greatest American filmmaker of all time. Unfortunately, I’ve read too much Pynchon to the point where I can’t help but feel like I was let down.
