This isn’t The Maltese Falcon where the detective puts the clues together and the audience gets a payoff. As long as you pay close attention, you’ll at the very least get the gist of the mystery, but Inherent Vice isn’t really worth the gist because the case is an example, not the story. Even if you're transported by Anderson's craftsmanship and sense of place, there are times when the film itself morphs into 'one of those unabridged paranoid hippie monologues' Doc loves so much, as the brutish Bigfoot puts it.The plot requires you to be fully attentive as we follow three intersecting cases, and a bevy of characters providing a barrage of information. The mystery is both the whole deal in 'Inherent Vice' and completely beside the point. Shasta's languid, explicit come-on to Doc and Doc's reaction (Anderson's idea, not Pynchon's) trade one sort of movie for another, and it feels a little exploitative. Some scenes, such as Witherspoon and Phoenix in a long, single-take dialogue on a park bench, are impeded by over-insistent musical scoring. Josh Brolin (Bigfoot), Reese Witherspoon (Doc's sometime lover, an assistant district attorney), Martin Short (marvelous as Rudy Blatnoyd, D.D.S., a dentist not to be trusted) and Joanna Newsom (as beachcomber Sortilege, Doc's gal Friday and, in Anderson's adaptation, the narrator) lead a huge cast all marching to the same hazily demented drummer.īoth times I saw 'Inherent Vice,' I experienced roughly the same contradictory responses: delight undercut by puzzlement, followed by a happier sort of puzzlement. Phoenix is turning into his own comic master of unpredictable timing and sweet-natured naivete. I suggest the following: Watch the film with neither eye on the plot. By the time this character, Coy Harlingen, moves into a prominent story place you may find yourself doing a little 'Huh? Wha? What's the connection? Does it matter?' dance in your head. It's better for it, although a key emotional landing point - the fate of the session musician played by Owen Wilson - doesn't quite land the way it should. Though the coming-attractions trailer for 'Inherent Vice' is delightful, the film itself strikes darker, sadder notes than indicated by its marketing campaign. (Two of my favorites: Petunia Leeway and Scott Oof.)

The novel has its serious undertow, though primarily Pynchon was having a ball with the old private-eye cliches, inventing some of the greatest character names since S.J. Shot on ever-rarer 35-millimeter film by cinematographer Robert Elswit, the film captures a moment (1970) in LA's history when the counterculture ran headlong into Ronald Reagan (then California's governor), Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War and the Charles Manson murders. In a variation on 'True Confessions' and a hundred old crime stories, Doc's frenemy from the old days is Bigfoot Bjornsen of the LAPD, who makes Jack Webb look like Dennis Hopper in 'Easy Rider.' All roads in Pynchon's story lead to an Indochinese drug cartel known as the Golden Fang, and Anderson has roped in as many characters from the novel as possible.Īs a physical, tactile object, 'Inherent Vice' is inspired. The developer, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), works with neo-Nazi bodyguards, one of whom is murdered, and Doc's a suspect. One paragraph of plot description is more than enough with 'Inherent Vice.' Shasta's lover is a powerful LA developer who has been packed off to a dubious sanitarium in Ojai. It's not quite the right shape why is this movie, with its surfeit of baroque narrative curlicues, actually longer than 'The Master,' which could've easily supported an additional half-hour? Watching 'Inherent Vice,' you sense Anderson rationalizing his overgenerous final cut with the argument that, well, this wasn't exactly multiplex fare anyway, and Pynchon's a pretty rich stew for the average moviegoer to begin with. The presence of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, laughing gas, alcohol and, most of all, Anderson's fond devotion to Pynchon's intoxicating language act as agents of heightened disorientation.Ĭoming off the grand, eccentric 'There Will Be Blood' and 'The Master,' a couple of great American movies, Anderson's latest is smaller potatoes. The mystery at the oscillating center of the story concerns drugs, but altered states of consciousness inform every second of every scene en route, from the beach to the canyons and the scary sunniness of greater Los Angeles.

Movie reviews inherent vice