Inherent Vice is an incredibly dense film, thick with plot threads, characters, and confusing motivations, part talky detective story (à la Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye), part comedy—easily the funniest thing writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson has ever made—part travelogue of the Los Angeles you never see in movies, and part elegy for the youthful optimism of the 1960s. It feels, in short, like three or four movies projected directly on top of each other. Even though I saw it and loved it, I won’t feel fully qualified to review it until I’ve seen it three or four more times, at least.
Inherent Vice the novel took a lot of shit from reviewers who didn’t like its unserious Saturday-morning-cartoon-caper vibe, but that very tone serves the film adaptation brilliantly. “Doc” Sportello, the perpetually stoned hippie private investigator at the center of the narrative, is one of Thomas Pynchon’s most human creations. And the mystery he’s trying to solve—surrounding his one-that-got-away ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth, a conspiracy that may or may not center on a pulp-novel criminal syndicate called the Golden Fang—offers Anderson ample opportunities for allusiveness without paying strict homage to any particular era of film.
Perhaps on account of Anderson’s rumored collaboration with Pynchon, the film is surprisingly loyal to the spirit of the novel—though no living human filmmaker could be faithful to the letter of a Pynchon book, even this relatively light one, in a two-hour movie. Joaquin Phoenix packs every scene full of physical comedy, nailing Sportello’s serious unseriousness with every facial twitch. But Josh Brolin’s performance as Sportello’s sometimes-partner/sometimes-antagonist Lt. Detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen is the real attention-getter. Bjornsen seems as stolid and straitlaced as Brolin’s brush cut at first, but his little peculiarities accrete to paint a portrait of a man who can match Sportello dysfunction for dysfunction. As the dropout and the sellout orbit around each other, the friction escalates until each starts to recognize his own characteristics hidden beneath the other’s surface.
Anderson’s 1970s Los Angeles is a golden refuge for the unloved, a shabby seaside village where characters run in tight little circles and occasionally collide. Inherent Vice has the willfully obtuse appearance and pacing of an actual ’70s drama, which is to say: Good luck understanding the plot. But as with all good detective stories, the mystery itself is the least of Inherent Vice‘s real concerns. Sportello’s bloodshot eye is continually distracted by the throbbing need of an entire sunbaked city’s worth of people around him. Everybody’s missing somebody. But for all the need and ache, the film’s tone is borderline zany. (After the prickly, fuck-you energy of Anderson’s last film, The Master, this comes as a welcome relief.) Much of the friendly energy probably comes from Johnny Greenwood’s score, and the rest of the soundtrack, which has the good sense to toss evocative period tunes (the Tornados’ “Dreamin’ on a Cloud,” Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleur”) on a turntable and leave the driving to them.
The cast is full of actors who seem to be doing their own thing. Joanna Newsom is eerily good as the sad-voiced narrator. Martin Short’s mercifully brief turn as a dentist maximizes his energy while simultaneously minimizing his tendency to grate on a viewer’s patience. Katherine Waterston, wearing the kind of smile that teeters on the verge of tears, brings an alluring sadness to the role of Shasta. Her melancholy is a siren call for Sportello’s particular brand of white knight, but even he seems to understand—in the tiny part of his brain he hasn’t anesthetized with whatever drugs he can scrounge—that Shasta stands about as good a chance as a crumbling sand castle against the incoming tide.
Even as its central mystery unravels, Inherent Vice jealously guards some of its secrets. What’s at the heart of Detective Bjornsen’s broken pride? What, if anything, does Sportello want? Do any of these characters even exist? What’s Anderson’s thing for women with high, childlike voices? Is there actually a Thomas Pynchon cameo in the movie, as Josh Brolin has insinuated? Maybe multiple viewings will solve some of Inherent Vice‘s puzzles, but more likely, this is a movie that shares exactly as much of its interior life as its authors do. We should be happy with that deal—not every question needs an answer. 