Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice (15)

USA 2014 149 mins  Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short, Eric Roberts, Serena Scott Thomas

Could this be Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Big Lebowski? Well, it’s got a shambling stoner hippy protagonist, a labyrinthine noirish plot, plenty of absurdist humour, and a classic rock soundtrack (Neil Young and Can rather than Creedence Clearwater Revival and Kenny Rogers). But it’s also darker and scuzzier than the Coens’ masterpiece, pitching its groovy Marlowe-esque gumshoe against The Man in paranoid post-Manson 1970 LA as he mounts a convoluted, psychedelic investigation that takes in a vanished tycoon, Aryan brotherhood bikers, a resurrected tenor sax player, a collection of erotic ties, a dentists’ tax shelter and a brothel menu that includes such delights as the “pussy eater’s special”. That There Will be Blood director Anderson received a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination seems only fair, as he’s the first filmmaker ever to shoulder the challenge of wrangling a Thomas Pynchon novel onto the screen.

Sporting the finest mutton chop whiskers since Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner, Joaquin Phoenix exudes woozy charm as baked and befuddled PI Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello. He’s roused from his state of transcendental relaxation by the unexpected reappearance of alluring ex-ol’ lady Shasta Fay Hepworth (Waterston). She wants him to investigate an alleged plot to have her current beau, breadhead Jewish aspiring Nazi real estate developer Mickey Wolfman (Roberts), kidnapped and dumped in a loony bin. The plotters are Mickey’s wife (Thomas) and her lover. Before long, both Mickey and Shasta have disappeared and Doc finds himself the chief suspect in a murder investigation, which places him in the firing line of his ‘hippy scum’-hating nemesis, Detective Christian F. ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornsen (Brolin). Bummer, man.

To attempt to explain the meandering plot any further would be pointless. The whole eccentric, loose-limbed head-trip is so gloriously strange, in keeping with Anderson’s claim to be influenced in equal measure by The Long Goodbye and Cheech & Chong, that it’s best to just get a buzz on, go with the flow and enjoy the trip, as the appropriate period vernacular would have it. Along the way, we meet Benicio Del Toro as a useless lawyer, a relatively restrained Martin Short as a cocaine-snorting dentist pervert, Reese Witherspoon as an assistant DA/Doc’s unlikely current squeeze, and Owen Wilson as an unhappy saxophonist snitch. Don’t expect much help from Joanna Newsom’s spacey narrator, with her daffy references to “karmic thermals” and astrology (Neptune is “the dopers’ planet”, apparently). Versatile Joaquin Phoenix captures the mood perfectly, inhabiting that Oscar-nominated garb like an authentic first-generation hippy, while Josh Brolin is suitably disturbing as the straight-arrow cop with a disconcerting habit of eating chocolate bananas in a suggestive manner. Think of this as a dazed and confused period pothead companion piece to both Boogie Nights and The Master. If you can resist attempting to answer the question so frequently posed of Phoenix (“What’s up, Doc?”), you’ll find that Anderson, that most cherishably idiosyncratic of modern American filmmakers, has skinned up a cult classic. Gravity’s Rainbow next, then? Or perhaps not.