Inherent Vice

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson (based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon)
Stars: Joaquin Phoenix (Doc Sportello), Josh Brolin (Bigfoot Bjornsen), Owen Wilson (Coy Harlingen), Katherine Waterston (Shasta Fay Hepworth), Reese Witherspoon (Deputy District Attorney Penny Kimball), Benicio Del Toro (Sauncho Smilax, Esq.), Martin Short (Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd), Jena Malone (Hope Harlingen), Michael Kenneth Williams (Tariq Khalil), Martin Donovan (Crocker Fenway), Joanna Newsom (Sortilège), Eric Roberts (Michael Z. Wolfmann), Hong Chau (Jade), Maya Rudolph (Petunia Leeway), Sasha Pieterse (Japonica Fenway), Jeannie Berlin (Aunt Reet)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2014
Country: U.S.
Inherent Vice
Inherent ViceThe films of Paul Thomas Anderson have frequently been described as “Altmanesque,” especially his career-defining one-two punch of Boogie Nights (1997), a multi-decade epic centered around the denizens of the Southern California porn industry, and Magnolia (1999), a kaleidoscopic portrait of interlocking lives over a 24-hour period. Like Altman’s Nashville (1975), both of those films are grand, ambitious, multi-character tapestries that feel charged with spontaneity despite being rigorously controlled. Less often remarked upon, but no less important regarding the Altman comparison, is Anderson’s tendency to pinball from genre to genre and tone to tone, never making the same movie twice and always keeping his audience guessing as to what he will do next. Just as Robert Altman veered from satirical comedy, to multi-character drama, to science fiction, to televisual stage adaptations, and back again, Anderson is seemingly compelled to tackle new ideas and try out new approaches. How else to explain following up Magnolia with Punch-Drunk Love (2002), an exquisitely beautiful and incredibly odd riff on Adam Sandler comedies, which he then followed with There Will Be Blood (2007), an austere portrait of megalomania based on an Upton Sinclair novel?

In a way, then, Inherent Vice, Anderson’s freewheeling, pot-hazy adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 byzantine noir-esque mystery novel, is a most Altmanesque film. Not only does it continue Anderson’s impossible-to-predict genre shifting, but it feels like a particularly heightened variation on Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), which had the radical notion of planting Raymond Chandler’s hardened private dick Philip Marlowe smack in the middle of Southern California hippie culture and having Elliott Gould play him as a languid dolt (one of ’70s Hollywood’s most memorable deconstructions of heroism).

There is a lot of The Long Goodbye in Inherent Vice, although the film it most directly resembles is the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998), which similarly sent a constantly stoned protagonist into an increasingly weird netherworld of criminals and oddballs with the ostensible goal of solving a mystery that, in the end, doesn’t really matter all that much. However, whereas the Coens infused The Big Lebowski with an indelible drugged-out charm, much of it courtesy of Jeff Bridges’s now-legendary performance as The Dude, which helps the film go down smooth despite its shaggy-dog plot meandering and nonsensical digressions, Inherent Vice feels conspicuously labored in evoking the blissed-out world of its slacker hero, a bumbling private detective named Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, who also headlined Anderson’s previous film, 2012’s The Master).

Set in the fictional seaside surf town of Gordita Beach in 1970, Inherent Vice’s overlong two and a half hours features a plot that can be politely described as a purposeful mess (there are at least three “cases” being investigated simultaneously), which will frustrate to no end anyone who wants to untangle and make sense of all its intersecting characters and plotlines (even those who have read Pynchon’s novel have had trouble following a lot of it). Suffice it to say that Doc and his wild muttonchop sideburns are sent on a mission by a former flower-child girlfriend (Katherine Waterston) to head off a plot to kidnap her current lover, a wealthy real estate tycoon (Eric Roberts), and commit him to a mental institution. For various reasons that are either fuzzy or downright impenetrable, Doc crosses paths with a rogue’s gallery of So-Cal caricatures, including his primary nemesis Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a flat-topped police investigator whose fascistic squareness is the antithesis of Doc’s freewheeling insouciance; Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a supposedly deceased musician who Doc is tasked with finding; Tariq Khalil (Michael Kenneth Williams), a member of a Black Panther-like political group who wants Doc to track down a member of the Aryan Brotherhood he met in prison; Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon), a deputy district attorney who inexplicably sees Doc on the side; Jade (Hong Chau), a squeaky-voiced massage therapist/prostitute; and Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short), a coked-out dentist. The film is narrated by Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), a winsome moonchild who hangs out with Doc and describes his adventures with florid prose that unfortunately reminds us that these kinds of stories tend to work best on the page, where great verbal style can make amends for the lack of sense it all makes.

Perhaps that was the challenge that Anderson set for himself: creating the cinematic equivalent of Pynchon’s brilliant prose style. If there is a director alive who could do it, Anderson is that director, and there are moments scattered throughout Inherent Vice that remind us of what a dazzling filmmaker he can be. Unfortunately, though, the film’s convoluted plot and lack of genuine feeling for the characters undercut even its most impressive sequences, making the film feel empty where it should be boisterous, boring when it should be at the very least intriguing. There is a fine line between purposeful meaninglessness as a postmodern critique and lulling your audience into a pointless stupor of disaffection. Inherent Vice frequently tilts more toward the latter.

Of course, the film is supposed to be first and foremost a comedy, and Anderson has stated that one of his primarily influences was the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker rat-a-tat-tat school of comedy best exemplified in Airplane! (1980). That sense of gonzo humor exists in Inherent Vice, but it’s more theoretical than practical, not to mention repetitive. There are a lot of jokes packed in there, both verbal and visual, and I imagine that elements of the film will work better with repeat viewings. However, unlike The Big Lebowski, I don’t expect that many will want to revisit its overlong descent into narrative meaninglessness, much less form a church around it.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (2)




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