“Inherent Vice”

Call me hyper-critical, or a contrarian all you’d like, but I’ve got a love-hate relationship with the works of director Paul Thomas Anderson. On the one hand, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood are classics that I can watch almost on repeat; while, on the other hand, films like The Master and Punch-Drunk Love leave me utterly dissatisfied. With Inherent Vice, PTA’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel of the same name, I find myself somewhere on the fence; more disinterested than dissatisfied, and certainly not in love. Unfortunately, on the fence is painful place to be.

The story of Inherent Vice centers around a private detective – Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc – undergoing a series of investigations in 1970s Los Angeles. Honestly, I can’t really begin to tell you much more than that about the plot, both because it’s intensely episodic and meandering, and because I found so much of it to be indecipherable, especially in the early segments. Doc’s case load begins with an investigation into a kidnapping plot, but ends up spiraling out of control as one case after another is added to the list and segments of each begin to intersect in the most tangential of ways. While, in most films, this would indicate that each case is a smaller piece to a larger puzzle, in Inherent Vice, its intensely episodic nature results in a film that is less about plot and more about individual moments, many of which don’t truly contribute to the whole. I often found myself truly confounded as to why Doc was going to certain locations, or whether or not what I was watching was actually noteworthy, as characters and subplots mix together in a cryptic haze not unlike the drug-fueled stupor that Doc spends much of the film in. Making matters more complicated is the fact that many of the characters upon whom major events in each case hinge are introduced unceremoniously much later in the story. Along with the incessant voice over narration of Joanna Newsom’s Sortilege – dialogue that is so riddled with hip period slang that it goes beyond simply grating and enters the realm of infuriating – suggesting paranoid connections at every turn, Inherent Vice offers a mystery that I eventually just stopped caring about. By the time the film trudges through its two hours of overly-jokey sketches and reaches its sudden and violent conclusion, I’m only marginally more aware of what’s happening than before, and even then it feels like there are still dozens of plot threads left dangling.

The cast of Inherent Vice turns in largely unremarkable performances, considering their strengths individually. By and large, it often seems like they’re playing character types, rather than fully realized characters, with Paul Thomas Anderson relying on the aforementioned voice-over narration to convey detail that would have been better revealed through action and dialogue. Even leading men Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin fail to overcome or expand upon their largely one-dimensional characters, though both still manage to draw laughs when necessary.

In the end, I’m not sure whether the inherent vice – the naturally occurring flaw that leads to an item’s deterioration – of this film is my own inability to fully comprehend everything happening onscreen, or if it rests on the shoulders of Paul Thomas Anderson forgetting that his films will be seen by people other than himself and those intensely aware of the source material. It has its moments, and it’s certainly sincere, but Inherent Vice just isn’t my bag. [4/10]