Based upon the novel by Thomas Pynchon
Written for the screen and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
**1/2 (two and a half stars)
PTA, for the very first time, I think you kinda lost me. Or maybe, you didn't. I'm really just not sure at all...
Dear readers, if you have been faithful visitors to this site, then you are all fully aware of my complete allegiance to the filmography of Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson, an artist I feel is one of the finest American filmmakers we have working today. For nearly 20 years, Anderson (or more affectionately know as "PTA") has crafted an increasingly idiosyncratic cinematic filmography of unusually high quality. For my own personal tastes, his epics "Boogie Nights" (1997) and "Magnolia" (1999) represents two of the finest films of the 1990's while his searing and ahead of the curve "There Will Be Blood" (2007) represented one of the finest films released in the decade between 2000-2009.
For a filmmaker who possessed a certain Scorsese-ian or Altman-esque quality to his rich cinematic canvases, in recent years, beginning with "There Will Be Blood" and continuing with "The Master" (2012), Anderson has seemingly adopted a tone that is decidedly more akin to Stanley Kubrick, a colder, more hands off approach that feels no less intense but one that is more emotionally removed and therefore, increasingly impenetrable to decode. "Inherent Vice," Anderson's seventh film as well as his adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel, is his most inscrutable escapade to date.
"Inherent Vice" is a 2 1/2 hour plus comedy/drama/detective film that is so fueled and filtered through a dense haze of nicotine and marijuana that you would easily receive a contact high from the screen. That said, the film is so remote that I am truly unsure as to what Anderson was trying to say about this material, these characters and the landscape that he has visually rendered. Certainly, I deeply appreciate any filmmaker who is determined to not attempt to tell me what to think about their material and Anderson is unrepentantly a filmmaker who refuses to spoon feed his audience and defiantly treats film-goers as intelligent beings worthy of an adult yarn. Even so, and while I may have my ideas, "Inherent Vice" ultimately becomes a frustratingly meandering tale that truly tested my patience regardless of how much there was on screen to greatly admire.
Joaquin Phoenix, in his second collaboration with Anderson, stars as Los Angeles Private Investigator Larry "Doc" Sportello, an aging hippie and perpetual pothead who is greeted at the opening of the film (as if through a drug fueled hallucination) by his ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fey Hepworth (a terrific Katherine Waterston). Shasta informs Doc of her fears that there is a covert plot underway to institutionalize her new boyfriend, wealthy real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), by Wolfmann's wife and her lover.
Doc agrees to investigate, which then sends him on an odyssey that forces him to not only constantly run afoul of his nemesis, Police Detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) but also propels him to obscure beachfront brothels, a gang of neo-Nazis, a drug smuggling syndicate known as The Golden Fang, the offices of a cocaine snorting dentist (played by Martin Short), the inner sanctum of a cult run insane asylum, as well as a concurrent yet connective missing person case featuring the whereabouts of saxophone layer/police informant Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson).
As complicated as that plot description may already sound to you, this truthfully only scratches the surface of the world contained within "Inherent Vice," and I am not entirely certain if the layers upon layers of material, situations, motivations and characters (plus all of that pot) was necessarily a good thing. As with every single one of Paul Thomas Anderson's films, "Inherent Vice" is a brilliantly acted ensemble piece by the entire cast as well as an experience that is a beautifully visualized presentation, which again finds Anderson collaborating masterfully with the veteran Cinematographer Robert Elswit. And I must give special credit to Radiohead guitarist/songwriter Johnny Greenwood, who on his third collaboration with Anderson, also again proves himself to being one of the cinema's most exciting, haunting and unorthodox composers.
Regardless of the glistening aesthetics of the film, I do have to get into the heart of the matter. Now, I have not read the novel from which this film is based so I cannot attest to how faithful or loose of an adaptation this film happens to be. Even so, I felt that Paul Thomas Anderson richly captured a certain dusty, funky vibe of Southern California 40 plus years ago that works as a conceptual bookend to his "Boogie Nights," which took place at the end of the 1970's and the beginnings of the 1980's. In many ways, "Inherent Vice" felt to be a film that is navigating a certain death of the 1960's, or at least any notions of mythologized "peace and love" era, as the haze of that psychedelic period has given way to the eye opening grim realities of societal, financial, and sexual corruption, the increase of heroin, as well as the mounting conservative climate's decimation of the counter culture itself (especially evident in some of the actions of the clearly closeted homosexuality of Detective Bigfoot).
If this film were a song, it could have been entitled "This Is The Sunset Of The Age Of Aquarius" as the copious amounts of drugs on display within the film are not used for any sense of mind and spiritual transcendence, or even as a source of societal rebellion but as more of emotional pain killer and even as a retreat from reality itself, an aspect of "Inherent Vice" reminded me very much of Director Terry Gilliam's "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas" (1998).
Within the character of Doc, who is indeed nursing some deep emotional wounds from his broken romance with Shasta Fey Hepworth, we are also indeed tethered to a most unreliable narrator, who despite his honorable intentions as a P.I., is quite possibly too far gone for us to even take the fullness of his pursuits at face value. The further the film unspools, we are treated to moments and sequences that very may well exist solely within Doc's drug addled mind as Paul Thomas Anderson does weave a certain mounting drug fueled paranoia over the course of the film. No, "Inherent Vice" does not dabble in wild fantasy sequences at all and there are no drug freak outs but that pot haze certainly grows thicker as the narrative becomes more labyrinthine, and for that matter, impossible to fully penetrate (but bit more on that later).
"Inherent Vice" also treats us to the melodic and laconic spaced-out narration by a female figure known as Sortilege (winningly portrayed by musician Joanna Newsom), who essentially functions as Doc's inner voice and closest confidant. While she is seen throughout the film, she interacts with no one else but Doc, which suggests that even she is a hallucinogenic invention, thus making her the film's most unreliable narrator by a mile. To a certain extent, this element works very effectively within the topsy-turvy world of "Inherent Vice" where almost nothing is real, or reality itself feels so increasingly unreal. But even so, I did wish that Paul Thomas Anderson had added a bit more method to his madness to give the proceedings a greater context, weight, or even purpose.
As I have previously stated, the narrative of "Inherent Vice" builds in complexity over the course of the film to a near dizzying degree. I have to say that perhaps for the film's first hour, I was completely with the film and its bong-water rhythms. However and unfortunately, the complexity of the story becomes so muddled and confusing that after quite some time trying to remain attached to it, I ultimately gave up trying to follow all of the twists, turns and intricacies. In Anderson's defense, and in keeping with the grander themes of unreliable narrators, and the succumbing to a drug fueled fantasy world to escape the rise of the heartless excess of the 1970's, I wonder if we are even supposed to be able to keep up with the narrative in the first place. But then...if the story is not designed for us to keep pace with, then what is the point overall?
Additionally, and in regards to Paul Thomas Anderson's filmmaking skills, I have to say that I deeply missed the more visceral nature of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," where the sheer intensity of those films was so powerfully unnerving to the point of near exhaustion. While Anderson's films have evolved to a more crystalline palate and with more deliberate pacing, "Inherent Vice" stumbles quite a bit due to its leisurely pace with does become quite the slog. Now again in Anderson's defense, perhaps the cocaine fury of "Boogie Nights" would not be an appropriate tone for the pot drenched fogginess of "Inherent Vice" but even so, it did make for the most uncomfortable amount of seat sifting that I have experienced in any film that he has made to date. Characters would drift in and out of the film, exhuming one monologue after another and nothing ever really seemed to fasten itself together into a larger fabric. I could feel that the film was trying to build to something and believe me, I really have no idea of what the end result was supposed to be. The film's final sequences, which feature Doc and Shasta, covey a palpable sense of loss but of what exactly? It is lost youth? A lost era? The loss of Southern California to more corporate interests? Innocence itself? All of it or none of it or something completely different? It was all so puzzling and not to an intriguing degree and by that time, I found myself not caring terribly much about all that had transpired.
Dear readers, I do not wish for my criticisms to dissuade you from seeing "Inherent Vice" as any film from Paul Thomas Anderson is indeed an event that demands to be seen and experienced on the big screen. I will even concede to the possibility that PTA has crafted a film that just cannot be gathered in one sitting and it is one that needs time to fully develop within the mind. It is a film that I would gladly revisit in the future especially as Joaquin Phoenix's performance is as full and transformative as what he elicited in "The Master" and PTA has unquestionably carved out another fully complete cinematic universe that also works as the next chapter on his continuing cinematic novel.
I actually do wish for you to venture out and see "Inherent Vice." Because maybe then, you could explain it to me.
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