- “No, seriously, I really did play Johnny Cash one time!”
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…