It was 1970. The '60s were over, and hippies were on the way out. Their image, dress, music, hair, lingo, drugs—once looked at as a threat to the mainstream—had in fact been co-opted by it. The hippie ideal of love had also been perverted and made monstrous by the likes of Charles Manson, a man whose name comes up more than a few times in Paul Thomas Anderson's latest ensemble blur, which he adapted from the Thomas Pynchon novel. Paranoia had replaced psychedelia. And when someone from the mainstream attempts to adopt the hippie belief that man should help his fellow man (in the case of real estate mogul Michael Wolfmann, he wants to give away all his property so people can live on it for free), that person is dealt with severely by friends, family and the government. How can the little guy—hippie or not—hope to survive? That's the world of INHERENT VICE.
The fact that Doc Sportello (played to dizzying comic perfection by Joaquin Phoenix) is a private detective is something of a curiosity right from the start. He's a consummate stoner, and he's a womanizer with a pretty sad success rate. The one woman who will sleep with him (although she doesn't like being seen with him in public), Penny (Phoenix's WALK THE LINE co-star Reese Witherspoon), is a member of the straight world, working as a deputy DA. Into Doc's life one lazy, late afternoon comes his ex-old lady who vanished about a year earlier, Shasta Fay Hepworth (a breakthrough performance from Katherine Waterston, daughter of Sam). Shasta has come up in the world in the months since she broke Doc's heart: she's sleeping with the aforementioned Mr. Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). His knowing wife and her lover are attempting to place in mental hospital for wanting to give the hippies free housing. Wolfmann has vanished and Shasta enlists Doc to find him.
What unfolds after that great cold opening is a tale that is rich with color, saturated with California warmth, all manner of brutality, and all manner of weird. If you've heard that INHERENT VICE's plot isn't important, and that its characters are what the film is really all about, you've only been told half truths. The plot is essential; so is the rich succession of freaks that parade before Anderson's lens. The story and mystery of the film are complex but not complicated. INHERENT VICE is casually told fable that cannot be viewed casually. Not every branch is as big and pretty as every other, but they all meet in the middle to make up one glorious tree.
I've seen the film four times in the space of a little less than a month, and as a result, I'm going to make a plea to the real film lovers reading who have made it this far. See INHERENT VICE at least twice, even if you adore it the first time—maybe even because you do. I'm not going to tell you what to focus on each time; everyone watches movies differently. Some focus on characters, some on plot, some on visuals and music. I was trying to take it all in the first time, and while I was never lost, you just miss so much. There's a language among the characters that is so specific that I missed a lot of it the first time. It reminded me of the first time I saw Rian Johnson's BRICK (not coincidentally another detective story of sorts), and I came out asking myself "What the hell language was that in?" But the second time with BRICK, it's like I had a translating angel in my ear.
There was something about my second viewing of INHERENT VICE—the film opened up to me completely. I heard and saw everything; even the jokes were funnier. Phoenix is tremendously off-kilter for the entire film. His reactions to the even wackier happenings around him are priceless, and he allows us to enter Doc's drug-addled mind just enough to know that most of what he's seeing is real, but his concern that he might be delusional is completely warranted. But nothing quite gets things going in this film like Josh Brolin's Lt. Det. Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, a hulking man with acting ambitions and a fetish for frozen chocolate covered bananas. He is Doc's nemesis and confidante. He hates that Doc gets results on cases where he cannot, and it's literally driving him insane. The role is oddly not that far off from his Milk character Dan White—both men are so afraid of change that they eventually crack in radically different ways.
And yes, seeing any movie twice or more opens it up to you, but there was something about this particular second viewing that lit a fire behind my eyes and set my brain alight. So there.
The supporting cast of INHERENT VICE is a goddamn embarrassment of riches, with the likes of Owen Wilson (in a wholly non-comedic performance), Benecio Del Toro (treading closely to his work in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Martin Short, Jena Malone, Serena Scott Thomas, Michael Kenneth Williams, Maya Rudolph, Hong Chau (as the indispensable Jade) and Martin Donovan.
Let me talk about one of the most interesting characters in the film (and this qualify as spoilery material for a moment): her name is Sortilège, and she is presented as Doc's best friend, his voice of reason, even sometimes the voice in his head when she's not around. She's played with a lovely Southern lilt by musician Joanna Newsom, in her first film role (she also happens to be Andy Sandberg's wife). She also serves as our knowing narrator (if you've seen any of the trailers for INHERENT VICE, you know her voice).
The first time I saw the film, something about the way she was presented struck me as odd but magical. But it was upon my essential second viewing that I noticed that not a single person outside of Doc addresses Sortilège in any way; plus, there were things about her narration that were more like mind-reading than storytelling. And I came to the conclusion that she was, in fact, not a real person. She likely was at some point in Doc's life, but for whatever reason, she transitioned into the rational voice in his head. Perhaps the book makes her existence more clear, but I think she's the intelligence and deductive reasoning (at one point, she refers to it as "hippie ESP") that has kept Doc alive and functioning well past his expiration date. Even if I'm 100 percent wrong, Anderson has set a stage that makes it feel okay to even consider the possibility, and that's one of the many reason I love it so much.
From Jonny Greenwood's avant-garde score to Robert Elswit's cinematography that is so beautiful it'll make you cry a little, INHERENT VICE isn't a movie set in 1970; it's a movie that strives in every way—from its look to its music to its spirit—to appear to have been made in 1970. And it reveals definitively that Anderson doesn't just strive to capture a period (only three of his seven films are set in the "present"); he adjusts his filmmaking style in ways that guide us into whatever place in history he's chosen to set his story. When I watch BOOGIE NIGHTS or THERE WILL BE BLOOD or THE MASTER, I don't feel like I've seen a movie set in their respective decades; I feel transported to them and then been allowed to come back. And I want back on those rides again and again. In case you can't tell, I like INHERENT VICE immensely.
