- Sarah Snook and Ethan Hawke in Predestination
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, which opens Friday in Chicago, continues a run of ambitious recent films—Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo, Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up, Philip—that try to convey in distinctly cinematic fashion what it’s like to read a distinctly literary author. All three films honor their source material by acknowledging that books and movies do different things. Rather than minimize the most idiosyncratic (really, the most novelistic) qualities of Thomas Pynchon, Boris Vian, and Philip Roth, these movies develop novel formal devices (pun intended) in an effort to preserve those qualities. They show that any author can be brought to life if the right filmmakers tackle his or her work.
Though somewhat sparse in its design, the movie looks like a comic book. The slightly exaggerated decors suggest a dream version of midcentury America compiled from representations in popular culture—film noir, DC Comics, the paintings of Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper—and some of the slanted camera angles recall comic book panels. Yet the Spierigs defamiliarize the comic book atmosphere by introducing qualities we associate with serious literature. Both main characters emerge as three-dimensional even though they couldn’t possibly exist in real life. Hawke and Snook play their roles naturalistically, focusing on the characters’ vulnerability within the convoluted sci-fi plot. Over the course of the story, the Unmarried Mother undergoes a physical transformation that might remind you of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (one of Moore’s points of reference in the Extraordinary Gentleman series, incidentally), and like that novel, Predestination is particularly obsessed with gender politics.
