The year 1970: Hendrix is dead, it has been a year since the
murder of Meridith Hunter at Altamont Speedway and the war in Vietnam has been
raging for 15 years. The hippy generation’s want for worldwide peace and love has now
been revealed to be a drug-induced pipedream and is collapsing in on itself due
to its inherent vice. Neo-Nazism is on the rise and the Black Panther Party and
Communism reveal extremism at both ends of the political spectrum. Crime is up
and illegal drug cartels are making addicts to create a market. And out of this
fog of pessimism, paranoia and hemp smoke comes Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix),
a dope-head private investigator trying to track down his ex-girlfriend and her
billionaire boyfriend, both of whom have disappeared. He’s lost for a lot of
his journey, as are we. In Inherent Vice there
is much confusion. As always, the great Paul Thomas Anderson asks the upmost of
his audience. Unlike the sparseness of There
Will Blood and The Master, Inherent Vice is stuffed with plot
points and characters that your mind has to paste together. This is not to say
that Inherent Vice is poorly crafted.
The narrative is as hazy as it wants to be. The images on screen are as
paranoid and vivid as Anderson wants them to be. The laughs (mostly from Josh
Brolin’s wonderfully absurd Detective Christian F. ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornson) are as
hearty as the film intends and the thrills and plot reveals are as striking as
to offset the comedy. The crime drama has well and truly met the stoner comedy
in Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel. This may seem like a
pointless observation due to the aforementioned source material but there is an
extremely novel-like feel to the film adaptation. The crime narrative unfolds
as a great crime novel should do whilst the tone is strikingly modernist, akin
to Conrad or Woolf. This is a hazy and confused film that portrays a hazy and
confused time. At the same time, Anderson’s superb direction and use of 35mm
fills the film with a nostalgia for a time that feels centuries in the past,
not a few years just been.
Underneath the haze there is real heart though. Phoenix’s
Doc is the distant cousin of Jeff ‘the Dude’ Lebowski, a kind man with little
greed in him. After the film has ended, after the haze has cleared, all we have
left is a man who wants his love back in his life. He wants the past. He wants
a time before billionaires and a drug cartel known as the ‘Golden Fang’ were running
the show. We have Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a former communist and current
police informant who just wants to return to his wife and daughter. These are
simple and pure plotlines that lovingly shine through. It is a hard time for sentiment
and hopes in a time where political and social unrest, drugs and crime are
rife. The film knows this. Greed breeds more efficiently than love in this
environment. This is not to say that love cannot survive though. Fortunately,
the film knows this as well.
8.5/10
