One of the great creative bromances has flowered again: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon. Having adapted Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for the screen in 2015, Anderson has now taken a freer rein with his 1990 novel Vineland, creating a bizarre action thriller driven by pulpy comic-book energy and transformed political indignation, keeping his pedal at all times welded to the metal.
It’s a riff on the now recognisable Anderson-Pynchonian idea of counterculture and counter-revolution, absorbing the paranoid style of American politics into a screwball farcical resistance, with a jolting, jangling, nerve-shredding score by Jonny Greenwood. It’s partly a freaky-Freudian diagnosis of father-daughter dysfunction – juxtaposed with the separation of migrant children and parents at the US-Mexico border – and a very serious, relevant response to the US’s secretive ruling class and its insidiously normalised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) roundups: the toxic new Vichyite Trump enthusiasm.
