After seeing “Inherent Vice,” I’m still not sure I can tell you what it’s really about. It’s a murder mystery in which both the mystery and the murder are largely ignored, a tale of a missing person in which the missing person isn’t missing, a kaleidoscopic gaze at the drug-fueled byways of California hippie culture circa 1970, a funny, clever, shambolic, rambling, run-on sentence of a film, less a movie and more of a vibe.
The movie’s genial, goofy vibe is a good one, though, and I largely enjoyed spending time in its presence, even, and sometimes because, I couldn’t quite figure it all out. Honestly, I’m not sure the movie and its makers have the full picture either.
Adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel of the same name, it’s a riff on the classic L.A. noir. The first scene finds Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), a young woman in distress, coming to visit Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a possibly stoned private investigator. Hepworth wants Doc to pursue a scheme involving a wealthy land baron, his wife and her lover. Doc agrees and starts down the trail. Before long, he has woken up in a dusty field outside a massage parlor, the dead body of the land baron’s body guard by his side.
The movie goes, well, not where you’d expect from there.
There’s a visit to a cokehead dentist played by Martin Short and warnings about something shadowy called the Golden Fang, which may refer to a boat, or perhaps something more sinister.
Neo-Nazis figure into several scenes, Owen Wilson shows up in overalls and floppy hair, and Benicio Del Toro appears as a maritime lawyer who orders a beer-battered steak. There’s a second detective subplot involving a dead husband who, to no one’s surprise, isn’t actually dead, and entanglements with various local and federal authorities. It’s all rather cloudy, which is presumably the point.
Of the local authorities, the one we get to know best is Detective Christian Bjornsen, who goes by the nickname Bigfoot. As played by Josh Brolin, he is a tragic, hilarious counterpoint to Mr. Phoenix’s ruffled P.I., with a mesalike flat top and skinny cop ties, a penchant for frozen chocolate bananas. (One of the movie’s strangest and funniest scenes is just an extended close-up of Bigfoot enjoying one in a car while Doc watches.) He’s a square-jawed, uptight monster, a hippie-hating superego who can’t keep his weird human id in check.
With his mop-top and oversized jackets and epic untrimmed sideburns, Mr. Phoenix makes a perfect centerpiece for the movie. He mumbles and meanders, squeals and squeaks in a way that suggests a paranoid intelligence. It’s his personal vibe on which the movie’s larger vibe coasts, and his messy but amusing thinking that the movie’s messy but amusing story emulates.
Paul Thomas Anderson, the impresario behind “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “There Will Be Blood,” directs the movie in an appropriately doped-up literary style, with low natural light, long takes and an emphasis on period details, especially surfaces and textures. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you with a sense of the feel of a leather couch, the heft of a jean jacket, the weave of an afghan blanket.
That’s just about right for a far-out trip like this. “Inherent Vice” isn’t a movie about what it’s about, whatever that is. It’s a movie about how it felt. And for this viewer, at least, the way it felt was pretty good.
1/2
TITLE: “Inherent Vice”
RATING: Rated R for nudity, sexual situations, language, some violence
CREDITS: Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
RUNNING TIME: 148 minutes
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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