Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 feature The Master is a hard act to follow, but the director achieves something nearly as mesmerizing with the sexy, sardonic, outlandish Inherent Vice. Adapted from the 2009 novel of the same name by Thomas Pynchon, the new film is a trippy experience, full of curious detours, absurd cul-de-sacs, and a sensibility that is both cinematic and literary. The latter stems in part from the honey-drizzled narration by folk musician Joanna Newsom. As a nymph-like phantom, she provides a thick slathering of Pynchon’s nimble, acerbic language while recounting the far-out experiences of one Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix).
The year is 1970, and in the fictional South Bay town of Gordita Beach, Doc makes a living as a late-model hippie private eye, solving cases in between joints and hits of nitrous. When the proverbial femme fatale walks into his life, it’s a familiar face: ex-flame Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston). She explains that her real estate mogul boyfriend is about to be committed to a mental institution by his green-eyed wife and her boyfriend. The still-lovelorn Doc leaps to Shasta Fay’s aid, eventually stumbling into a bizarre criminal conspiracy involving neo-Nazi bikers, a dead rock musician, the LAPD, a New Age self-help cult, and a drug-crazed pedophiliac dentist.
Inherent Vice is an engrossing, challenging, and multi-faceted work, crafted by a true virtuoso of American filmmaking. Even Anderson’s most severe features have a droll touch, but Inherent Vice is his first genuine comedy, albeit an uncanny and understated one. Like The Big Lebowski, Vice assumes the nominal form of a SoCal-flavored detective story and then proceeds to upend and deconstruct the genre. The film’s paranoid, hallucinatory style recalls Fear and Loathing and Las Vegas and Through a Scanner Darkly, while the eagle-eyed may spot some sly Dracula references. What will likely bring viewers back to Inherent Vice again and again, however, is the perfection of its execution and the novelty of its mellowed-out perspective on a world gone mad.
Inherent Vice opens in limited release Friday, January 9.
