TITLE: Inherent Vice
DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas Anderson
CAST: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Eric Roberts, Serena Scott Thomas, Benicio del Toro
CLASSIFICATION: 18DNLS
RUNNING TIME: 148 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
it’s either a load of total bollocks, or it’s an absolutely brilliant movie. What Inherent Vice isn’t though, is something you can just outright ignore.
Concentrating more on creating a feel for how a 1970s private detective, high on weed, would navigate the world, the film meanders its way around a convoluted plot.
Ultimately, it leaves behind hazy imagery in your mind that pops up like flashbacks more akin to LSD than weed.
Director Paul Anderson has taken Thomas Pynchon’s novel and turned it into a hyper-real fight between a pot-loving private investigator and the straight-laced Los Angeles Police Department abetted by its counter-subversive agents.
Set in the early 1970s, the film is centred on Larry “Doc” Sportello (Phoenix) who may or may not be seeing things, coming as he does out of the free love, lots of drugs, hippy 1960s. He is paranoid, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get him.
The convoluted story starts off when Doc’s ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherne Waterston), asks for help to foil a plot to hurt her new boyfriend, property mogul Mickey Wolfmann (Roberts). Then Mickey goes missing.
Before he can get properly invested in figuring anything out, Doc is approached by two different people for help in tracking down missing people. Hope Harlingen (Jena Malone) wants verification that her husband, musician Coy (Wilson), isn’t really dead, while Tariq Khalil (Michael Kenneth Williams) wants to find someone who owes him money.
It turns out that all of these missing people are connected. Throw in a schooner called the Golden Fang, a police detective named Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Brolin), a whole lot of sexploitation and plenty of weed, and we have a sleazy 1970s crime-thriller.
People get kidnapped, crime gets committed and Doc gets slapped around by the cops – apparently all in a day’s work.
Anderson doesn’t anchor the story in any particular chronological frame, so it wafts around from one moment to another, some of them even recorded on old stock film. The plot also doesn’t adhere to any linear throughline – it’s all over the place. But, there is a logic of sorts at play here – at least a logic for Doc, which we are privy to in flashes and spurts.
There is also a narrator of sorts courtesy of Sortilège (Joanne Newsom) – someone only Doc sees, which is where the thought occurs that he might be hallucinating. Anyway, this narrator tells part of the story, giving you insight into Doc’s frame of mind, delivering lines straight out of the Pynchon novel.
Once you let the chaos of all the eccentric characters and the mystery Doc is trying to solve, wash over you, you start appreciating it, but if you question it and try to corral it, the film just slips away from you. So, maybe Anderson is straddling that line between a load of bollocks and brilliantly inventive – but if you try to find that line, it slips away.
If you liked The Big Sleep (1946) or Magnolia, you will like this.