Inherent Vice will likely be a polarizing film. It is bound to either bring belly laughs and fresh insight on the one end of the spectrum, or confusion perhaps to the point of walking out of the theater on the other. Those hidebound filmgoers who see the need to evaluate every film in terms of cogent plot and conventional story arc will be at a loss here. Those nostalgic for a film that captures the freewheeling and often capricious nature of 1960s and early 1970s culture need only check out Paul Thomas Anderson masterful if highly unorthodox film. Anderson’s adaptation of idiosyncratic author Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel represents the first film to be attempted from the reclusive 77-year-old Pynchon’s canon. Its release heralds a high-mark in the marriage of a seemingly unfilmable author with a highly talented director (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Magnolia, Boogie Nights). Here when geniuses meet the seemingly impossible comes to fruition, albeit through a prism bent on significantly twisting our heads.
Joachim Phoenix has played a series of quirky if not full blown crazed characters. In Inherent Vice he portrays Larry “Doc” Sportello, a stoned but clever private detective constantly at odds with Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a cop who alternates between mercilessly harassing and ridiculing Sportello, and simultaneously gleaning information and services from him. Their interactions are the highlight of a film that constantly plays with expectations of conventionality and classic detective film tropes.
Its tongue firmly in its cheek, Inherent Vice toys with and even seems to taunt its increasingly convoluted dramatic progressions. What is left when the realization hits that following a plot isn’t all that important here, is a film whose essence is its incredible tone and its often surreal characters. Owen Wilson keeps popping up as a musician estranged from his family, first he seems compromised and possibly kidnapped by the evil forces of The Golden Fang, an Indochinese drug cartel, then later he’s possibly an operative for Vigilant California, a pro-Nixon, anti-subversive group.
Even Eric Roberts makes an appearance as the kidnapped, ultra wealthy Mickey Wolfmann, the former lover of Sportello’s ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, daughter of actor Sam), who shows up one day out of nowhere. The perfect femme fatale, Shasta has Sportello right where she wants him and he goes off on an odyssey full of crazed characters. There’s Reese Witherspoon as Penny, Sportello’s sometime lover who works as a lawyer for the D.A.’s office; Martin Short as Rudy Blatnoyd, a shady and hilarious dentist; and Benicio Del Toro as Sportello’s lawyer, Sauncho Smilax (Pynchon’s penchant for colorful names is never more evident than here).
Inherent Vice makes many references to the failure of the 60s counterculture. It’s not long after Charlie Manson’s tragedy and many of the hippies portrayed here are involved in harder drugs and subsequently have a washed-out look. Similarly, Wolfmann, confined in a sanatorium in Ojai, tells how he planned to spend his fortune by developing a desert community where everyone could live free of charge. He would have called it “Arrepentimiento” (translation: sorry about that”) but now, seemingly having come to his senses, Mickey says he’s “waking up from a bad hippie dream.” Inherent Vice includes a panorama of many of the “ancient forces of greed and fear” that came to destroy that dream; it also serves as a wondrous kaleidoscope of the dream’s original vision.
Phoenix and Brolin Are Brilliant/Inherent Vice Soars….4.5 (out of 5) stars