The only way to understand this film is to see it twice, but nobody will want to

There's a good reason why Thomas Pynchon's works have not until now been adapted for film and that reason is Inherent Vice; watch it, if you can, and you'll see exactly what's scared wiser directors away, and perhaps what drew Paul Thomas Anderson to rise to the challenge. So promising! Inherent Vice is possibly Pynchon's most accessible and "cinematic" novel, as it draws on the film noir tradition of detective stories (particularly, Chandler) but set in a stoner world of 1970s LA (Altman did the same thing, successfully, in Long Goodbye, I think). This material should, one might think, translate to film; but it's obvious here ten minutes in at most that this film is a train wreck occurring right before our eyes. Pynchon is famous for his sharp dialogue (the film can capture that) and for his baroque and at times surreal, elaborate, detailed, often confounding plots - and here's where this movie entirely fails. In a novel, we follow the plot at our own pace, and all Pynchon readers, I'm sure, occasionally step back, re-read, pause to think, and at other times rush forward headlong. In the film, we're stuck with the steady forward motion of the narrative, and the story just becomes increasingly confusing and, eventually, you give up, or at least I did. The only way to make sense of this film would be to see it twice, and nobody will want to. And that's because the pleasures are just not there the first time through - the characters are vague, flat, unappealing; the humor, which may work in a book, when made more physical, visceral, and literal in a film, just falls flat. J Phoenix gives it a valiant try and appears in virtually every scene, and PTA, thanks to his stature, can command a battalion of star actors stepping into bit parts, but there's no center to the movie and certainly no emotional engagement. Phoenix's character (Doc,  a PI) is so cool and stoned that he is oblivious to danger, and so we don't care much about him, either. A Chandler novel turned into film, w/ various voice-over narrations, develops not only plot but character; in this film, the narration is so frayed and fragmentary that we have no sense of the central character at all - nothing moves him, nothing drives him, he's just propelled along from scene to scene. The movie clocks in at 2.5 painful hours - far, far too long for this material. Throughout, I was hoping for a cameo from Pynchon and didn't spot one, though it's possible he appears as one of the men dressed in white at the sanatorium/rehab center that Doc visits well into the film. Not worth waiting for, however.