Paul Thomas Anderson (one of America’s greatest living filmmakers) is directing a film adaptation of a book by Thomas Pynchon (one of America’s greatest living writers) starring Joaquin Phoenix (one of America’s greatest living actors), so Inherent Vice has some hype behind it. Like all Anderson’s work, the big question has always been “what kind of release will it get?” as his slow-moving, frequently baffling films rarely lend themselves to wide studio releases. The answer, it turns out, is the New York Film Festival, where Inherent Vice will debut on October 4.
That’s about all we know at this point. The book is a darkly comic crime saga set in 1970s Southern California, and will also star Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Maya Rudolph, Josh Brolin and Owen Wilson. Anderson plays famously loose with his adaptations of books (There Will Be Blood was supposedly inspired by Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, not that you’d be able to tell from the movie itself), so it’s anyone’s guess how close this film will be to the source material. That said, there is not a more consistently compelling filmmaker working in Hollywood today …
