Inherent Vice will not be for everyone. In fact, the film will only appeal to the select few outside arthouse snobs, indie-pioneers, and Paul Thomas Anderson devotees. It's a journey an audience must have a lot of patience for. A lot of patience. Fiddle with your phone or whisper to your neighbor for even a second and you will become lost in the intricacies of the plot-- one that on the surface doesn't seem very difficult to follow at first, and then finally becomes a web so delicately strung and interwoven that all hope of following everything that happens perfectly to the end becomes impossible. I knew going into it that I was going to have to pay close attention. I knew this because I am familiar with every piece of work that Paul Thomas Anderson has released and I'm familiar with the complex writing of Thomas Pynchon. In fact, I was following the story very close up until just before the two hour mark of the movie when all Hell broke loose and I couldn't tell you what in the hell happened in the last half hour.
A plot description may be a little difficult to explain and to those already planning to see the film, a bit unnecessary, but here's the sparknotes of the sparknotes version. Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc, a quirky private investigator who, in the first fifteen minutes of the film, is roped into several cases at once by many different characters. First, there's his ex-girlfriend who shows up at his house asking him to help stop a plot by her boyfriend's wife--and her boyfriend-- of putting Doc's ex-girlfriend's current millionaire, land-developer boyfriend away into a nuthouse and subsequently give all of his millions away. Confused yet? Then, there's Michael K. Williams showing up and asking Doc to help him track down a white supremacist he knew in jail that still owed him money. And finally Jenna Malone asks Doc to find her dead husband (Owen Wilson) who is sorta confirmed dead, but she knows really isn't. All of these cases coincide with Doc's original "find the millionaire" case. Then, to add a cherry on top, Doc is constantly harassed by local police officer 'Bigfoot' (Josh Brolin) in helping to solve and even question his involvement with the cases. Still confused?
The set up for these cases happen pretty organically and are explained fully. But the further and further Doc gets into the cases the more weird shit happens, the more characters pop up that were barely introduced, if at all. The original cases are put aside and more and more weird shit behind the case and different from the case emerge and suddenly you find yourself lost wondering what the point of the entire film even was. Now, this might just be me. My attention span may have gotten the better of me and someone with more brain capacity than I may be able to follow the story easily, but for the average movie goer, the journey will be frustrating one.
However, no matter how lost I got in the plot and the characters, I still found myself enjoying the film immensely. It's a very funny film. Joaquin Phoenix, for all his strangeness and irregularities as an actor, can play quirky quite well. His comedic chops were briefly shown to us in Signs as he played the quirky brother and comic relief. Since then, his roles have become wrapped in quirk, and it's something that he's mastered. He's a great actor... and a great actor with a sense of humor is hard to find. Most of the other minor characters show up only once, maybe twice but lend their own brand of humor and weirdness to an already strange script. Each character's nuance only strengthens the story and pleasure most fans will have watching the film. Josh Brolin, once again, steals every scene he is in. He's a tough cop, with a hard exterior, who wants to be an actor, and is constantly emasculated by his wife. He's a complex character with very humorous results. But, Doc is the one that the audience will fall in love with. It's the drug-fueled 70s and Doc is rarely seen without a joint in his mouth. He's bizarre and a bit dim-witted, but he's not dumb, and he knows how to research and solve a case.
Paul Thomas Anderson treats Inherent Vice like a cross between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Big Lebowski in the sense that the more drugs Doc is on the stranger and more hard to follow the story becomes. And much like Lebowski, Doc is in every single scene of the film. PTA has never been known as a conventional director. This is evident in his past work (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Punch-Drunk Love, etc.). And there is nothing un-PTA about Inherent Vice, but like I said, it is going to frustrate most viewers to the point of giving up all hope in figuring out what happened in the last half hour. The best part about PTA, though, is that you don't have to understand everything that's going on to enjoy the film and that's how I felt about this film. By the end I was piecing together everything in order to try to make a coherent picture and I just couldn't, but I still really enjoyed the film.
B
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