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| Joaquin Phoenix stars in Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice. |
Ever wandered through the early morning fog? The dim glow of
street lights peaks through the haze but fails to illuminate the shapes whose
outlines you recognize but do not recall. The farther you walk, the thicker it gets,
and when you reach the end of the road, there is no path to follow but back the
way you came. Or, is that gone, too? Maybe you did not wake up, and your 4 a.m.
stroll is nothing but a dream. You fell asleep on the couch and imagined a trip
you never took. You cannot know for sure.
With Inherent Vice, director Paul Thomas Anderson
invites audiences along on his own 4 a.m. stroll, and as could be expected, the
experience is decidedly singular. Never one to make the same movie twice,
Anderson adapts the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name and puts his own spin
on the neo-noir detective story at its core. The results are a stunning and
complex mix of radical art house experiment, investigative thriller, and stoner
comedy. As I said – singular.
After the classically mounted, even baroque The Master,
Anderson has spun around 180 degrees to face the seedy, sunny underbelly of
Southern California in 1970. Making the turn with him is The Master star
Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Doc Sportello, a private investigator more
interested in smoking weed than solving cases – that is, until ex-girlfriend
Shasta (Katherine Waterston) walks back into his life.
Shasta is dating billionaire real estate mogul Mickey
Wolfman. Wolfman’s wife and her lover are plotting to kidnap him and commit him
to an insane asylum – or “loony bin” in the parlance of the film. Though their
aim is clear, their motive is a little fuzzy, which could stand in as the
caveat for most characters’ motives in Inherent Vice. In any event, they
want Shasta’s help to carry out the crime, so she enlists Doc to get her out of
her predicament and solve the mystery.
All of this is laid out in the film’s first scene, even
before the opening credits have played. Despite clocking in at a couple minutes
shy of two-and-a-half hours, Inherent Vice moves along with the speed of
a bullet. The minute Shasta leaves Doc’s apartment the first time, he is thrown
headlong into a complex web of underworld and law enforcement syndicates with
complementary and contradictory goals, usually both at once.
To describe the plot further, however, would be a disservice
to the film. Inherent Vice is not what happens; it is how it happens.
The reveal of a kidnapping conspiracy may be the inciting incident, but the
nuts and bolts of the mystery and its ultimate resolution are almost tangential
to the heart of Anderson’s film. If you are trying to keep tabs on the plot –
which can be done, as the picture is not as labyrinthine as some would have you
believe – you are missing the grander experience.
The film plays equally well as absurdly heightened reality
or drug-induced hallucination, but its tone never wavers because Anderson
understands that dreams have their own internal logic. Anything can come true
if you can imagine it, but you cannot see what you cannot believe. As Doc
meanders through the marijuana haze of his life, he runs into character after
character operating off the same dream logic he does, yet critically, they are
consistent always to the people we know them as.
This is not Fellini-esque surrealism. No one breaks into
song or dance. There are no talking animals or whimsical spirit guides. While
the movie is laugh-out-loud funny at times, we never get the sense this would
be a fun or magical world in which to live. This is a world in pain and in
recovery at the same time. As the war in Vietnam continues to take its toll on
the national morale, the hippie culture that developed around it is burning out
faster than their roach clips can handle.
In a cast more sprawling than any in recent memory, we meet
druggies, hippies, gangsters, bikers, policemen, Feds, musicians, families, and
more. Almost no one is an innocent bystander. Perhaps the biggest joke in the
film comes during one of its saddest scenes, when a wife and mother tells Doc
about her former heroin addiction. She did not know the drugs could pass
through breast milk. She shows Doc a picture of what she did to her baby. Doc’s
hysterical reaction is a tremendous laugh for the audience, but the shame she
feels and the pain she caused are real. There are no bystanders.
Just because you cannot stay out of the game does not mean
you should play it either. Josh Brolin plays Bigfoot Bjornson, a straight-laced
homicide detective and wannabe actor who loathes hippies and has a love-hate
relationship with Doc. Bigfoot is a man who does not belong to any of the
worlds he inhabits. He simply performs the roles assigned to him because what
else is he supposed to do? He is not a man out of time. He has no time, and
Brolin is excellent at portraying this inner turmoil realized as misplaced
outward aggression.
Waterston’s Shasta has the opposite problem. She is fully
comfortable in her own skin and fits in anywhere she chooses to go, but she is
such a user – in more ways than one – she finds herself with nowhere left to
choose, so she returns to Doc. It is a common scenario in film and in life. We
destroy our present and cloud the future, so we revert to the past, looking for
stability and hoping nothing has changed.
This rarely works because no matter how often we go back, we
cannot stay in the past. We move forward and circle back, move forward and
circle back, and only the lucky few realize they are caught in a loop. Shasta
shows up at Doc’s doorstep over and over. Doc finds a missing girl he has
already found. The rich get rich, lose it, and regain it. Respect and love ebb
and flow with tide. People come and go and fall and rise. Nothing changes, but
nothing remains.
Like a man trapped in a hurricane who keeps running toward the
eye rather than away from the storm, Doc is trapped by circumstance and self.
He twists and turns, bends and breaks, swirls and whirls in every direction but
forward. Phoenix is made for this role. Despite a career spent playing
introverts who pass the time by chasing temptation and dodging consequence (Walk the Line, Gladiator, I’m Still Here,
We Own the Night, and I could go on),
Phoenix feels uniquely suited for the part of a crusader who puts himself in
harm’s way in an effort to do what is right.
With a shaggy head of hair and the constant glaze of
marijuana in his eyes, Phoenix’s Doc exudes self-confidence even as he is often
baffled by the events unfolding around him. He does not think twice about
carrying only his bravado into the den of a hired killer who keeps the company
of neo-Nazis. He ambles comfortably around places he does not belong, communes
with hippies and commandos alike with equal ease, and faces down guns like he
was born in front of a firing squad.
Yet, as so many of his cinematic predecessors, what he
cannot control is his love of the one who got away: Shasta. The film’s best
scene is the second time she shows up at his home. Anderson specializes in
scenes of two people confronting the truth about each other and their shared
past in which one person talks and the other just listens as the pain builds.
Here, Shasta does the talking as she bares herself flesh and
soul to him. She is equal parts vulnerable and cunning, like a wounded cat that
will strike if you attempt to help it. Waterston is playing notes all over the
scale in this scene, and she hits every one of them with precision and the kind
of tonal depth that comes from the confluence of great writing, great acting,
and great directing.
Phoenix listens as well as anyone in the game, and though we
see only the shadows of his face, the anger and love he feels are palpable. For
everything she has done to him and what she is trying to do to him now, he
should hate her, but “should” does not really play a part in the maelstrom of
emotion. A scene that lasts only a few minutes communicates a lifetime worth of
sentiment. It all ends with Doc exploding in a fit of violent passion, and why
wouldn’t it? This is his dream.
See it? Yes.
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