Inherent Vice
Grade: B
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be blood)
Screenplay: Anderson, from Thomas Pynchon novel
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix (Her), Josh Brolin (Labor Day)
Rating: R
Runtime: 148 Min
by John DeSando
“Doc may not be a ‘Do-Gooder’ but he's done good.” Sortilege (Joanna Newsom)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s neo-noir Inherent Vice has inherent liabilities such as the always challenging Thomas Pynchon (try navigating Gravity’s Rainbow), whose novel Anderson has adapted, and Anderson’s monumentally good previous features like Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. As the opening quote implies, this fictional world is full of contradictions, a hot mess of irony.
Yet, it’s tough to throw that Anderson bum out because even with early 70’s head games and enough “characters” to choke Robert Altman, this film is a successful evocation of an era (from Nixon to flower children), a satisfying send up of The Big Sleep, and performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin to get the Academy’s attention.
Hard-boiled Doc (Phoenix) is trying to find his missing love, Shasta (Katherine Waterston), amid the moral chaos of LA and his own excess weed smoking. Watching him carefully is banana-chomping Lt. Det. Christian F. Bigfoot Bjornsen (Brolin) riding roughshod over the vice-prone, inherent vice-addicted, city of angels. Like everyone else, Bigfoot is not as he appears.
Perhaps Doc’s constant pot smoking is necessary to deal with the array of deviance and incoherence a world after major assassinations and constant Vietnam presents for a daily diet.
Although this is a mash up of ‘70’s tropes, Anderson has the almost impossible: humor and homage. The pussy-eating, bj shop ($14.95) sequence is worth the admission alone—watch Phoenix’s reaction when he isn’t the one getting the introductory special. Also watch pothead Doc wield his toke—it’s almost musical. The respect for pulp fiction is palpable.
While Inherent Vice is a wild stew of ‘70’s and film noir nostalgia, peppered with colorful paranoia in, the larger arena inhabited by the mind of Paul Thomas Anderson, it is a cinematic reverie about a past that was as colorful and lost as any other in the 20th century. Crime is still with us but never the psychedelic characters he and Pynchon create.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
