Five minutes into Inherent Vice, a haggard Joaquin Phoenix sits fixed with a dazzling glare shifting between his ex girl-friend’s staggeringly mundane beauty and the hair-brained plot she’s sweetly relaying to him about a ruse to institutionalize her current lover. Worried she’s overwhelming him she stops, but Joaquin’s rag-tag free-spirited PI Larry “Doc” Sportello assures her insisting “Don’t worry. Thinking comes later.”
Paul Thomas Anderson has always made you mentally put in work with his films. With a repertoire of what many consider modern day classics like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and recently The Master, Anderson’s films are slowly put together like a puzzle that’s not quite finished until a couple days after the credits roll, which is a great segue into Anderson’s latest film, Inherent Vice, based on the novel by great-American author Thomas Pynchon.
Hot off the decade of love, Vice follows Doc as he travels all across Gordita Beach, a fictionalized surfer hang out on the shores of Los Angeles. Promising to dig up some dirt on the plot to kidnap his ex-flame, Shasta’s (Katherine Waterston) current man, a mega wealthy real-estate LA bad boy named Mickey Wolfmann, the dopamine Dragnet wanders down a loose trail of crumbs laid out for him by lead after lead, steering the investigation in and out of the original case, and deeper and deeper into a perpetual mass of conspiracy and corruption underlying the groovy days of the 1970’s.
Inherent Vice reads off the paper as a Wes Anderson film, chock full of larger than life quirky characters running around with reckless abandon, eventually brining on their own self destruction or inner happiness. However, as opposed to W. Anderson, PTA digs into his characters with everything he’s got, exposing their humanity, making one of the most heavily lampooned era’s in American history realistic. Doc is more than just Shaggy with a badge; his strange pauses, erratic spontaneity, and thoughtful fixated stare flex the character’s emotional depth and breathe life into what could have easily been another stoner in the sand seen in countless films of the 70’s. Along the investigation, Doc listens to testimonies from ex-convicts, prostitutes, square jawed policemen, cracked out jazz musicians, coke addled rich girls, Nazis, surfers, and an enigmatic maritime lawyer, mostly played by a remarkable cast of Hollywood heavy hitters like Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, and Owen Wilson (to name a very select few).
Throughout Doc’s psychedelic journey, Inherent Vice expounds on every drug-fuelled nightmare spit out by flower power days, fluently referencing Nixon and Manson with ease. Although easily one of the funniest films of 2014 (disregarding it’s very-late year release), Inherent Vice functions outside of typical genre tropes, a feat PTA has largely always maintained, and the hazy mystery tale will speak differently to just about every person that watches it.
If you go see it sometime in the next month, come say hi to me. I’ll be slightly left of the center of the theatre with a red Member’s Only jacket and a PBR.
