Review: Inherent Vice (2014)

In what is possibly the most beautifully confusing cinematic experience I've had, Paul Thomas Anderson's most recent feature, and his seventh film, manages to to be an absurdest, stoned out trip down the sweaty, drug addled and sex crazed summer byways of 1970 Los Angeles, as we follow an equally absurdest and stoned out private detective as he is quickly dragged into an incomprehensible conspiracy involving hippies, Neo-Nazis allied Jewish land developers, cults, and Chinese heron dealers, stemming from the novel by reclusive author Thomas Pynchon.

Anderson gleefully dives into the world of the post Manson LA, intentionally making a film that feels just as sweaty and baked as the people who populate it. Ambling along for two and a half hours, and seemingly intentionally spinning off into bizarre tangents and byways, Anderson creates a film that entertains by confusing you. It's a weird way to give it praise, but there's something charming about how this film so dedicates itself to inhabiting this burned out world. By doing so, however, Anderson holds a bitingly sarcastic mirror to the nostalgia for the hippy movement and what it represented. By focusing on the absolute weirdest and most out there burn-outs of the time, Anderson shows exactly why the hippy movement fizzled out so ignobly, while at the same time, capturing the strange malaise that formed in the vacuum that the hippy movement left in the national zeitgeist. Instead of free love and flower power and mind expansion through acid, we catch America just as she begins to emerge from that haze of drugs and sex, feeling thoroughly hung over and confused on what just happened, and where to go next, no doubt helped by Joanna Newson's continual narration, which is filled to the brim with hippy speak.

This is further helped by the excellent acting, with Joaquin Phoenix's stoner P.I. Doc Sportello functioning as a rather offbeat audience surrogate as he desperately tries to untangle a hopelessly wild gorgon knot of a conspiracy. Edged by his mysterious ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston) into exploring the disappearance of a wealthy Jewish land developer (who employs Neo-Nazis as his security detail), Doc Sportello stumbles along, dazed and confused in a hilarious way, and Phoenix portrays this burnt out charm perfectly with his big eyes and slightly slurred speech.

The rest of the cast, including Josh Brolin as hyper butch LAPD officer Bigfoot Bjornsen, Reese Witherspoon as Sportello's current squeeze and straitlaced lawyer Penny Kimball, and Owen Wilson as saxophonist/government agent Coy Harlingen, and Katherine Waterston's melancholic and mysterious Shasta Fay, the entire cast is having fun in their roles and in running around the strange little world that Anderson creates here.

Robert Elswit's cinematography is rich and evocative, while also using his trademark high contrast and slight overexposure, which fits the tripped out feel of the film. The colors are always either super bright or darkly muted, with the sun drenching during the day, and a perpetual haze of dope smoke hovering in the air. It's also uniquely grainy, helping give the film a retro period feel.

Jonny Greenwood's score is a great riff on both his own hard-edged style, and the music of the era, blending in with an eclectic mix of obscure songs from the likes of Can and Neil Young to help further this hazy, stoned out smoke screen vibe that Anderson strives for. It's great work, managing to have moments of beauty mixed in with humor.

Of course, since Anderson goes full tilt into being as bizarre and spaced out as possible, the film can be a bit difficult to comprehend plot wise. One gets the sneaking suspicion that Anderson's main goal is not to make a film with a concrete plot, but rather create a sarcastic study of the era, making you inhabit the world for a few hours, and come out feeling a little bit spaced out.

But even so, it's a fun, if weird ride, and I really did enjoy it for what it was.

5 out of 5.