![]() The song serves as a requiem both for a lost love and for a brief, perfect moment that, as the movie begins, is already almost over, with the idealism of peace and love giving way to the inexorable march of time and “the ancient forces of greed and fear,” as they’re called by the movie’s narrator, the possibly ethereal, probably immortal flower child Sortilege (Joanna Newsom). I think I’ve listened to Chuck Jackson’s version of “Any Day Now” every day since seeing the film-I was startled to hear it as the movie cut to black, but it’s as perfect a coda for Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s book as it is unexpected. It’s a feeling captured perfectly by the song that plays over the end credits (and if you consider an end credits soundtrack cue a spoiler, consider yourself warned). It’s that, beyond all of the missing real estate tycoons, Nazi bikers, Mansonoid conspiracies and coked-up dentists, at the heart of the movie is a pervasive undercurrent of melancholy that ties together its parade of sight gags and stoner humour and familiar faces popping up for brief, weird vignettes. It’s not a problem of not understanding the plot, as the mystery at the centre of Inherent Vice, while deliberately convoluted and elusive, isn’t nearly as impenetrable as many of the reviews have made it out to be. ![]() I’m not sure exactly where to begin with Inherent Vice-I’ve seen it twice now, and I haven’t completely wrapped my head around it, but I know it’s a movie I’ll be returning to for the rest of my life. ![]()
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