Inherent Vice: This dude does not abide
Director Anderson makes plodding travelogue, using jackhammer where feather would do
It’s not The Big Lebowski. But dude, you sure get the feeling Paul Thomas Anderson was looking for some brand of Coen brothers’ facsimile with his high-end adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s ode to the underbelly of Los Angeles. Published in 2009 but set in 1970, Inherent Vice wears its lust for nostalgia on its loose and dirty sleeve as it draws us into the spinning eye of a neuron storm named Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a pothead private eye with his own hippie-chic allure.
At the top of this sprawling and frequently confusing story, Doc receives a sultry request from his exlover Shasta (Katherine Waterston) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a real estate tycoon named Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts).
Immediately, we know Doc’s been hooked on a long line.
We also know Anderson is eager to evoke film noir sensibilities in shades of neon, thanks to the voiceover, the private-eye motif and the fetid setting of 1970s L.A.
Comparisons to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown are unavoidable, but where Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes was designed to strive for the heroic dimensions of Humphrey Bogart, Doc seems to be going for the bluntforce mental trauma of Dennis Hopper during his psychedelic period.
Doc does not shower or wear shoes with any regularity. He’s the dirty hippie who represented the biggest threat to the conservative establishment. And as such, he’s a character who embodies the spirit of an entire generation at its most idealistic — and its most hazy.
Anderson’s best scenes employ Doc’s character to make a point, but with a Lazy Susan of loopy side characters and a plot that feels more random than a marijuana-fuelled game of charades, figuring out where Anderson’s heading is impossible.
As a result, the entire film has to ride on Phoenix’s oddly shaped shoulders as we follow Doc around Greater Los Angeles at its most debauched.
Entering massage parlours, defunct developments and executive offices covered in fake leather, Doc becomes a warped lens of the era, pulling some elements into extreme focus and leaving others entirely blurry. This is where Anderson’s own taste becomes obvious as he briefly revisits the sleazy mood of Boogie Nights and the moral bankruptcy of Magnolia, films that exploited his penchant for stories without easy villains or heroes — just a parade of flawed humanity.
Inherent Vice is different from other Anderson films in that it’s far more formulaic in its structure: Doc has a foil in the form of Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), an LAPD detective who does small acting gigs on the side. Bigfoot and Doc are the Tom and Jerry of the piece, and you can feel Anderson lunging for the comic opportunities as they slide by in the slosh of cartoonish narrative.
Sadly, much of his giddy ambition yields little more than amusement because it just feels so desperate.
It’s a note Anderson plays with a jackhammer instead of a feather, and like everything else in this movie, it’s flattened by a self-conscious obsession with style.
As a result, Inherent Vice loses its personality and becomes a plodding travelogue of period seediness and archetypal character. Even Doc feels a tad shallow. He’s totally believable as a terminally distracted sleuth with mutton chops, but he lacks the deep sense of soul that made Jeff Bridges’ Lebowski so sympathetic, and that’s the movie’s biggest problem.
Instead of melting into the holes of the story like so much warm butter, the audience gets scraped across Anderson’s room-temperature toast. There’s no chemical reaction, which has the effect of leaving the audience cold.