Review of Inherent Vice (2014) by Mike N — 12 Mar 2015

With the exception perhaps of the visceral Boogie Nights, Anderson's films are always abstract artworks, whose stories you may be able to follow but whose unfathomable depths don't present themselves until weeks later, when the films smokey tendrils have danced around your head in twilight hours and unseen doors unlock to reveal chambers of speculation and disconnected imagery that somehow craft an almost pointillist painting whose dots drip over the span of days, and only when the last spec of paint dries can you then step back and see the exquisite peaks and valleys they form. So naturally, it was only fitting this director tackle the work of perhaps the most unfilmable of the post-moderns, and perhaps America's greatest living author, Thomas Pynchon.

In his squarely hippy homage to the hard-boiled detective novel, Pynchon introduced the world to the missing link between Phillip Marlowe and The Dude, the walking existential crisis of Doc Sportello. Anderson took Joaquin Pheonix, recharged from the emotional acrobatics of The Master playing lost soul Freddie Quell, and puts him in the sandals of Sportello, who could very well be Quell if he fumbled out of the doors of The Cause, stumbled face first into a bucket of liquified LSD and came out the other side with longer hair and a shorter attention span. From the exquisitely crafted soundtrack to the bizarre cornucopia of strange casting for even stranger characters (Owen Wilson as a shaggy rock drummer may not be much of a stretch, but Martin Short as a coke-dealing dentist is, as is former porn actress Michelle Sinclair as a surprisingly captivating, 70's version of the Ellen Paige exposition machine, except in this film, it somehow works), Inherent Vice is loaded with the kind of chaotically psychedelic pinballs that dazzle and misdirect, all of which shroud what, at its heart, is perhaps the simplest message Anderson's ever had in a film (but you won't get any spoilers from me, Doc).

Of course, the inclusion of the etherial gum-shoe narration of the novel in the form of the raspy voiced and mysterious Sortilege (played by harpist Joanna Newsom) makes the film both more and less intelligible in all the right ways, the sensuous and sympathetic tone to her delivery helping the film to successfully translate the typically conservative detective genre into its pinko-commie equivalent; and taking the antagonistic role away from the filthy hippies of yore is Bigfoot Bjornson, the fiercest hippy hater in all of California, played with exquisite self-deprecation by Josh Brolin, helping to unsettle any sense of certainty in a story that may be entirely enhanced or indeed invented by Doc's frequent indulgence of hashish, from ordering pancakes at a Japanese restaurant to performing fellatio on a banana.

Whether we're actually unravelling a mystery that tangentially involves a millionaire land owner and Doc's ex-old lady or just riding shotgun on a paranoid acid trip at the tail end of the 60's, crossing the bridge between Hair and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Inherent Vice certainly takes you to places you've never been, staring into the underbelly of the subculture that's become an iconic symbol of American freedom, exposing all its flaws and follies, and in the end creating the most spellbinding and perplexing puzzle in years. "The edge", 70's culture-explorer Hunter Thompson, who picked up right where the fictional Sportello leaves off, wrote "There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there." Every film he makes, Paul Thomas Anderson invites you with him, sometimes skirting the edge. But here, in Inherent Vice, he drives that glorious Vincent Black Shadow right over without once looking back, like the kind of leader he warned us not to follow in his last film. But we did follow, and went over the edge. If you haven't yet, it's ok. Like Hunter said, the edge is still out there. Find it. Follow us down. Take the trip. And good luck, Doc.