D
Inherent Vice
OC Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) looks like a ’60s Wolverine, with lambchop sideburns and a pair of faraway eyes. A man of life’s fugitive pleasures, he is living through that soft, melting afternoon glow of 1970s California — smoking grass, daydreaming and taking the occasional case as a private investigator.
When his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston) shows up and complains that her new squeeze, married property magnate Mickey Wolfmann, has vanished, Sportello finds himself at the centre of a conspiracy in which Indo-Chinese heroin cartels and dead white supremacists are among the major players.
Inherent Vice, adapted from the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, is a drugged-out detective odyssey that reverberates with the countercultural energies of its time, a sprawl of America glimpsed in all its splendid weirdness.
Pynchon’s sharp prose is given to a female narrating character (Joanna Newsom), who speaks his lines with a drowsy seductiveness, layered with the electric language of the time and now and again sliding into a playful mysticism (leaving her boyfriend, she says she’s just “locating a different karmic thermal”). This poetic voice frames the adventures of Sportello, who is something like The Dude of The Big Lebowski, but also resembles a slew of genuine neo-noir detectives.
His attempt to discover Wolfmann’s fate leads him into contact with the film’s wider cast: a lunatic assortment of dope-heads, corrupt dentists, Black Panthers, mysterious oriental masseuses and Aryan motorcyclists.
Josh Brolin plays a rough-hewn FBI agent, Bigfoot Bjornsen, who boasts of newspapers having called him a “renaissance detective”, and ghosts around making trouble for Sportello. Benicio del Toro has a turn as a greasy lawyer, one of Sportello’s pals, strung-out in a tan suit, his eyes dimming under the accumulated pressure of all the booze he’s slurped up.
So it’s a world in which you can imagine Hunter S Thompson infiltrating the Hell’s Angels, or Tom Wolfe writing about parties where the Kool-Aid is laced with LSD.
Although the performances are alive in an almost cartoony way, each character bringing their share of madness to the screen, the plot remains murky. The story loops and coils so many times, it’s difficult to stay in tune. Owen Wilson spends a moment on-screen conspiratorially whispering and mumbling crucial plot details, which doesn’t help.
And, true to the consciousness of its pothead protagonist, the film has its hallucinatory qualities, spooling by in a dreamy flow. Everything becomes labyrinthine, entangled and hidden.
In some sense, you have to succumb to the experiential drift of Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction, because it brings a magnetic force to each episode in spite of the wider, spiralling plot.
Sportello’s odd circuit ends up taking him through brothels and health spas, cutting through a wide crust of American subcultural madness, and Anderson renders it all in the vivid, popping colours of the era. With the help of Pynchon’s exceptional writing style, all the characters bristle with comic absurdity and are well supplied with humorous asides on modern affairs.
Inherent Vice unfurls slowly, meanders, and as it is firstly a kind of postmodern detective story set in an acid universe, everything takes on the status of being a clue. But the clues become lost in the chaos of story, and the real charm is to be found in the symbiosis between Pynchon’s satiric evocation of a weird moment in history, and the hypnotic world in which Anderson realises it. LS