Movie Review: 'Inherent Vice'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Extolling the virtues of Inherent Vice presents an imposing challenge: first you've got to find them.
Best of luck.
Inherent Vice is a befuddling comic film noir mystery set in 1970 that presents a meandering narrative journey that is incomprehensible to the drug-hazed investigating protagonist, a beachfront private eye, and, more to the point, comprises a puzzle that we couldn't care less about solving.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Larry "Doc" Sportello, a part-time private detective and full-time mutton-chopped stoner in Southern California's fictitious Gordita Beach, whom a former girlfriend drops in on – played by Katherine Waterston (daughter of actor Sam) – and, femme fatale that she is, asks him to help her track down her missing lover, a billionaire land developer who has gone missing, perhaps, she suggests, because he was kidnapped by his wife and her boyfriend.
But – all together now – things aren't always what they seem. Especially when you're being told a story through a pothead's eyes.
Sportello agrees and begins an investigation that brings him into contact with hippies, vamps, dentists, pimps, prostitutes, surfers, hustlers, rockers, loan sharks, gumshoes, rockers – it's one big paranoid party and everyone who is anyone is invited.
Check, please.
Josh Brolin plays a square-jawed, crew-cut Los Angeles cop with no time for counterculture types or private eyes; Reese Witherspoon a deputy district attorney romantically involved with Sportello; Owen Wilson a hippie tenor sax player who informs for the FBI; Martin Short a wackadoodle dentist; and Benicio del Toro an undependable attorney.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master, There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love), an auteur for whom this represents a precipitous decline in quality, adapted the best-selling 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon – the first Pynchon novel to go the movie route – and Anderson's decadent, down-and-dirty detective story, with its convoluted conspiracy, oozes countercultural sleaze. But everything and everybody in it feels arbitrary, as if placed there to test our patience and our hunger for internal logic.
To what purpose is perhaps the biggest mystery of all.
Only Brolin as detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen creates a character that draws interest, lifts off the page, and stays in the memory. Everyone else wanders around trying not to bump into the props scattered throughout the chaotic and mind-numbing narrative. Including Phoenix, who has so often over the years been a given film's strangest element. Not this time, when the material and treatment of it makes him seem downright conventional and professional.
Who'd-a thunk it?
As for those moments when the issue of reality versus illusion comes, there can be only two appropriate responses: "who cares" and "what's the difference"? Take your pick.
Call it a comedy if you must, but if you do, leave yourself plenty of time to search for the laughs.
Meanwhile, we'll detect 1 star out of 4 for the nowhere noir, Inherent Vice, an incoherent and inconsequential return to the psychedelic seventies that's difficult to follow but easy to hate.