As much is gained as lost when revisiting Inherent Vice (Warner, 15) on DVD. Paul Thomas Anderson’s woozy 1970s shaggy dog mystery takes a cut in the smoke-screened, sun-baked west coast atmosphere that proved so enveloping in cinemas, but its diffuse, distractedly woven storytelling straightens out a little in the process. Only a little, mind you. The kind of film one looks forward to watching again even before the first viewing is up, it sometimes rewards untangling only with winking voids. Like Thomas Pynchon’s source novel, Anderson’s film channels the intricate, mood-led bluffery of Raymond Chandler. The result is a spiritual bookend to the obtuse California noir of Robert Altman’s Chandler adaptation The Long Goodbye, with that film’s updates here converted to melancholy, amber-hued nostalgia for bygone hedonism.
What’s so remarkable, given this staggered chain of influences, is how warmly and pleasurably the film emerges as Anderson’s own: his cockeyed humour and more solemn humanism make absorbing work of the roundabout search undertaken by stoner PI Larry Sportello (a delightfully bemused Joaquin Phoenix) for his ex, her supposedly endangered lover and, in time, any kind of exit strategy. It’s surely the director’s least immaculate, slowest-burning film, but it’s also something of a grower.
I was hoping a second look might yield similar affection for Lisandro Alonso’s quizzically existential Patagonia western Jauja (Soda, 15), which has attracted a worshipful cult of admirers since Cannes last year. Alas, it still strikes this non-convert as a seductively empty exercise, its metaphysical observations too tidily contained within the preciously rounded corners of its perfectly composed tableaux. Those compositions, all in shades of cornflower and seagrass, merit a look on their own, as does Viggo Mortensen, sternly magnetic as a pioneering Danish engineer increasingly adrift in the alien landscape. But it’s a thing of wearying beauty.
After a double feature of Inherent Vice and Jauja, chances are you’ll be even more amenable to the tight narrative economy of Kajaki (Spirit, 15), a vivid, grindingly tense depiction of a British military crisis in Afghanistan that also marks a fiercely disciplined directorial debut for Paul Katis. Shrinking the physical scale of its drama in inverse proportion to its human stakes, the film calmly follows a parachute regiment about their daily business before stranding them in a riverbed studded with landmines. The survival thriller that ensues skimps neither on terror nor empathy, and leaves the band-of-brothers sentimentality of Lone Survivor for dust.
Katis has a punchy, restrained command of action; perhaps he can send a few tips to frenzied over-stylist Matthew Vaughn, whose jumped-up espionage romp Kingsman: The Secret Service (Fox, 15) is the kind of knowingly irresponsible splatterfest one could gladly excuse as “a bit of fun” if any fun were to be had in it. Rather, as this tale of sharp-suited gentlemen spies taking on a deranged American ecoterrorist strains for shock effect towards its calculatedly excessive finale, the unvarying pitch of the film’s violence and snarky irony prove only tedious. Vaughn’s imagined masterstroke – a rancid massacre of a far-right church congregation fashioned as a moral victory – encapsulates the joyless boyishness of his film-making.
If we must choose between wretched spy capers, I’d frankly rather rewatch David Koepp’s far less capable Mortdecai (Lionsgate, 12), this effortfully wacky, sub-Wodehouse gibberish, starring Johnny Depp as an MI5-entangled art dealer, is merely stupid, not noxious. Preferable to both in the boisterous nonsense stakes is Australian thriller Son of a Gun (Koch, 15), a silly but slick-witted fusion of prison drama and heist adventure, starring Ewan McGregor as a master thief spearheading that eternally cursed “one last job”; it switches tone (and even genre) every 10 minutes or so, but none of its guises are boring.
Over to Netflix, where the week’s new additions include one outstanding under-the-radar documentary and a far-from-underexposed perennial that is nonetheless welcome. Richly shot in gloriously grainy 16mm, Andrew Renzi’s Fishtail is just an hour long, but brevity doesn’t impede soulfulness in this lyrical portrait of modern cowboys in Montana, which engages with the practical contemporary realities of the American west while stoically mourning the growing chasm between nature and its human masters. Finally, for those seeking more familiar comforts: Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is new to the service’s still understocked library of pre-1970s classics, and its sly inscription of its era’s shifting sexual politics within accepted romantic-comedy still gleams bright and sharp as a tiepin. More, please.
