Review of Inherent Vice (2014) by Ola G — 05 Apr 2015

In 1970, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), visits the rickety beach house of her ex-boyfriend Larry "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) in Gordita Beach, a town in Los Angeles County. Doc also happens to be a private investigator and hippie/dope head. Shasta tells him about her new lover, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), a wealthy real estate developer. She asks Doc to help prevent Mickey's wife (Serena Scott Thomas) and her lover from having Mickey abducted and committed to an insane asylum. At his office, Doc meets with Tariq Khalil (Michael K. Williams), a member of the Black Guerrilla Family. Khalil hires Doc to find Glen Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), a member of the Aryan Brotherhood he met in jail, who now owes him money and is one of Wolfmann's bodyguards. Doc visits Mickey's Channel View Estates project and enters the only business in the developing strip mall, a brothel/massage parlor, where he meets an employee, Jade (Hong Chau). Doc searches the premises for Charlock, but he is knocked on the head with a baseball bat and collapses. He awakens outside, lying next to Charlock's dead body and surrounded by policemen. Doc is brought to the police station and interrogated by Detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) of the LAPD. Here, Doc is helped by his attorney, Sauncho Smilax (Benicio del Toro). Doc then takes on his third "case". He is hired by former heroin addict, Hope Harlingen (Jena Malone), who is looking for her missing husband, Coy (Owen Wilson). She was told that Coy was dead; but she believes he is alive because, shortly after his supposed death, there was a large deposit to her bank account. Coy searches for Doc and says he is hiding at a house in Topanga Canyon. In a second meeting, he reveals he is a police informant and fears for his life, only wanting to return to his wife and daughter. At his office Doc finds a message from Jade who apologizes for setting him up with the police and tells him to "beware of the Golden Fang". He meets her in an alley, where she explains that the Golden Fang is an international drug smuggling operation. Doc talks to Sauncho, who gives him some information on a suspicious boat called the Golden Fang and tells him that, the last time the ship sailed, it was with Shasta on board. The plot thickens for "Doc"...

Paul Thomas Anderson is by far one of my favourite directors, having entertained me on several occasions so I was truly looking forward to see "Inverent Vice". While P.T normally works with large ensembles in his films, like this time as well, he has always managed to keep things together both plotwise and characterwise, but with "Inherent Vice" you can only wonder if they all smoked dope while making/editing the movie. The plot is such a stretch with so many subplots it makes no sense at all in the end. It´s incoherent, messy and the main character Larry "Doc" Sportello walks around in the same universe as The Dude, but while The Dude was actually coherent in many ways, Larry "Doc" Sportello is not in his clear mind once during the whole movie. Yes, I haven´t red Thomas Pynchon book, but with this adaptation I can only imagine how the source material is. The New York Post?' s Kyle Smith bemoaned the film as being "... meandering even by Anderson's standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2 1/2-hour endurance test... mostly the film is a hazy, backlit stoner vision filigreed with half-hearted comedy and an occasional reference to the End of the Hippie Dream... these are all throwaway jokes, not a coherent satiric vision... five minutes after it ends, you won't remember the resolution, mainly because Anderson is too cowardly to take a chance by actually saying something." The movie does´t know what it is or what it wants to be. At times I had the same feeling as I had when I saw the "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III" (one of the worst movies I have seen) also a movie that desperately tries to be hipster funny, but misses all the marks to even be close to being funny. "Inverent Vice" is simply not funny, dramatic or exciting. Only bizarre, weirdly melancholic, selfcentered and drug hazed with no direction or goal. P.T obviously wants us to be inside "Doc"s doped up and fragmented brain, but I don´t want to be there as I rather have structure on things. I reckon P.T was reaching for a mix of "Chinatown" goes Cheech & Chong, but lost the framework somewhere on the beach of L.A. Joaquin Phoenix is good as "Doc", Katherine Waterston mysterious and lovely while Josh Brolin is Josh Brolin. And adding actors such as for example Martin Short and Owen Wilson hardly helps the movie to reach some sort of funny structure. The trailer made the movie look like a Tarantino-esque crime/comedy, but the movie is more along the line of one long drug fulled dialogue that never seems to end that no one understands. Not you, nor the characters. I was truly disappointed on "Inherent Vice".