One of the best things about the movies Paul Thomas Anderson makes is how rich and dense they are. They’re full of thematic dots that need to be connected, visual details that need to be noticed, and the revelatory sort of performances that are so fresh and nuanced that they send your mind racing off in a thousand different directions all at once. They’re the kind of movies you have to see more than once to feel fully comfortable with, and that tend to get better the more times that you see them. He’s a master director, and maybe the only one working who has the skill set necessary to make a worthy adaptation of one of the works of Thomas Pynchon, a novelist who’s also known for creating art that’s difficult to digest, though rewarding once you do so.
Inherent Vice is the fruits of Anderson’s attempt at bringing Pynchon to the big screen. It’s a drug and sun-soaked detective story set in 1970 LA that has more to do with the mourning of lost love and the corruption of the 60s counter culture thanks to its poisonous introduction to sex-crazed cult figures and heroine than it does to presenting you with an actual mystery or introducing you to a protagonist who does any real detective work. Said protagonist, Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), is much more of an observer than he is anything else—an incorruptible figure who’s pushed through a gauntlet of deceit and wrongdoing by a femme fatale ex-girlfriend named Shasta (Katherine Waterston) so that we can see if he’s able to come through the other end still pure and in one piece.
Maybe the most important warning one can be given about this movie is that it takes the concept of the unreliable narrator to the next level, so you’re likely to be confused quite a bit while watching it. Not only does it include a voice over narrator (Joanna Newsom) who physically appears and disappears randomly throughout the film, and who may be a real person or who may be some sort of apparition that exists solely in the protagonist’s head, but it also features a protagonist who’s in such a state of constant confusion and inebriation that you can never tell if what you’re seeing on the screen is really happening or if it’s just a product of his paranoia and hallucinations. At times things have popped off so weird that what you’re watching would seem to absolutely have to only be happening in Doc’s head, but then they have concrete results later on, and you’re left to question your perception of things all over again. Just because Doc is crazy doesn’t mean that the world isn’t crazy too. But which is crazier?
If you can get comfortable with being confused, you’ll quickly realize that confusion isn’t a problem in this movie, because the particulars of the story aren’t what’s important. The plot of Inherent Vice exists solely as an excuse to get Doc moving from place to place and from interesting encounter to interesting encounter. This isn’t a story that you’re being told, it’s a wavelength that you’re being put on (expertly, through the claustrophobia and paranoia of the close-range cinematography, the thumping drive of the score, the crafted absurdity of the dialogue, etc…), a vibe that you’re being given an opportunity to tap into. The story is a rope pulling you through the fog, but being lost in the fog is the point of the experience. There are a lot of interesting things you can experience while being lost.
What we’re doing here is dancing around the issue of what kind of movie Inherent Vice is, exactly, because it’s not the average sort of flick that can usually be caught in the local multiplex. People keep trying to compare it to things from the past, like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, for context, and these comparisons make sense, because they’re all neo-noir tales set in LA where a laid back detective stumbles into a story that appears to be much more complex on the surface than it actually ends up being in the end; but the truth is that this movie has a good deal more diverse a range of influences visible in it than just the easy comparisons. It contains so much more dark magic and danger than either of those other stoner noirs. It’s corrupt and rotting at its center like Chinatown. Also, Doc’s perpetually bewildered state of being provides it with some of the hallucinogenic mania and high-minded monologuing of Terry Gilliam’s Hunter S. Thompson adaptation, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And though Inherent Vice comes from an established tradition of stoner detective stories, it’s also heavily steeped in a good number of Paul Thomas Anderson’s go-to subjects, like the corrupting influence of ambition, and broken people desperately looking for someone who will love them even in their broken state. This movie is at the same time a worthy Pynchon adaptation and a work that’s recognizably Anderson.
Of all the goodness that gets tucked away in Inherent Vice, the best thing it has to offer is probably the relationship it develops between Doc and a hard-nosed, civil rights-violating policeman named Bigfoot (Josh Brolin). At first glance these two characters would appear to be complete opposites, Doc a dirty hippy and Bigfoot a clean cut square, and their always antagonistic and often physically abusive relationship backs up that interpretation, but on a deeper level there’s also something of a brotherly romance that exists between the two, and it’s fascinating to watch Phoenix and Brolin as they slowly let their buried affections bubble to the surface. Despite their differences, Doc and Bigfoot are both men who thought they had a partner, and who thought they knew which direction the world was moving in. The universe made sense to them, and then all of that got taken away, and they’ve both been in a state of mourning ever since. They’re never going to be on the same page—even an attempt at a symbolic peace offering inevitably turns into a power struggle between the two—but it’s also clear that they’re continually drawn to try for it, and the fits and starts of their awkward attempts make for infectiously entertaining cinema. Phoenix and Brolin are both perfect in these roles, and they’re never better than when they’re sharing the screen together.
One could go on forever picking out all of the memorable bits of dialogue, memorable moments, or memorable supporting performances (Waterston, Newsom, Hong Chau, and Martin Short are all too good for words) that get packed away into the dark corners of this movie—there’s no denying that it’s full of good stuff—so the ongoing debate about it is probably going to exist around the question of whether all those individual parts ever come together into a complete whole that will stick with its audience for years to come, or whether they’re bound to get lost in the fog of a story that confuses simply for the want of being confusing. Personally, I’ve already made it to the point of loving Inherent Vice deeply, after only two viewings, and I’m willing to bet that more and more fans of artful filmmaking are going to start feeling the same way once they get the opportunity to see it a few more times themselves. This is a work that can only grow in esteem over time. Isn’t that the way it always is with Anderson’s stuff?
