Blog

By Sandra Olmsted

Director Paul Thomas Anderson adapts Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice and captures Pynchon’s love of movies and the transition from the decade of free love to Nixon era paranoia. Although the dying counterculture looks sad and stoned and the future looks depressingly scary and corporate, the film has innumerable movie references and cameos galore by star after star, who elevate the whole film with intense performances.

Hippie gumshoe Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) gets pulled into a world of hurt and trouble when the quintessential woman in trouble, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, Sam Waterston’s daughter), shows up with a problem. She knows that her boyfriend, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), an unscrupulous, big shot real estate developer, is going to be kidnapped by his wife and her lover, and they’ve offered to cut Shasta in on the deal, but she says she doesn’t want it. Shasta’s appearance brings back good memories and bad emotions because Shasta and Doc used to be together, but then they both caught different “karmic thermals” and “watched each other drift away.” Then Shasta disappears at the same time as Mickey’s “kidnapping.” Soon, with the help of Jade (Hong Chau), Doc discovers The Golden Fang, a sailboat once owned by a blacklisted actor who reappeared with new politics and a new career and is now owned by Dr. Blatnoyd (Martin Short), a dentist in charge of drug-dealing cartel. Meanwhile, police detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) has it in for Doc at every turn and shares some mysterious past with Doc.

Doc also takes another case with a dead husband, Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), who may not be dead, and a big payoff mysteriously appears in the bank account of Hope (Jena Malone), Coy’s wife, an ex-addict who became a drug counselor. Doc’s new girl, Penny (Reese Witherspoon), an assistant DA, may have an ulterior motive for dating him. Fortunately or unfortunately, Doc has a sleazy lawyer, Sauncho Smilax, Esq. (Benicio Del Toro). Doc’s assistant and confidant, Sortilege (singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom, in her big screen debut), provides occasional onscreen narration and fills in often ironic details and helps clarify the story. For Doc, these are “perilous times for dopers, astrologically speaking.”

Pynchon, the beat poet of the late 1960s/early 1970s, claims “American life is something to be escaped from” and captures the soon-to-be swept away lifestyle of the fictional Gordita Beach, which is modeled after Manhattan Beach, where the author lived in the late 60s. Dry, tossed-off punch lines require careful listening, and because the film almost plays as a parody of itself and of detective films in general, don’t expect resolution as much as a delightful experience of being surprised by the endless plot twists. Like The Big Sleep, the atmosphere, double speak, innuendo, and emotion between the characters in Inherent Vice make the seemingly disjointed scenes flow together and keep the audience riveted to see if Doc will find any truths, existential or otherwise. Anderson’s Inherent Vice also evokes 1970s California film noirs, such as Chinatown, and hallucinatory journeys, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Inherent Vice, a Warner Bros. release, is rated R for drug use throughout, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and some violence, and runs a patience-requiring 148 minutes. Inherent Vice opens January 9th in local theaters, but opened in limited release in December in hopes of Oscar nods, but Inherent Vice might be too non-mainstream and too innovative for the Academy. We will see on January 15, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces this year’s nominees.

Share on Facebook

Tweet

Follow us