5 Reasons to Watch Inherent Vice (2014): A Hazy Trip You Can’t Shake
Watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is like stumbling into a conversation you don’t fully understand but you just don’t want to leave. It’s a stoner noir where the plot disappears as soon as you try to grab hold of it, leaving you chasing threads that don’t need tying. Just like the maddeningly insane book by Thomas Pynchon, this movie isn’t for everyone—and that’s the point. It’s messy, bizarre, downright weird, and beautifully aimless. You might not know where it’s going…no that’s it. You might not know where it’s going and that’s okay.
1. Joaquin Phoenix: A Walking Fog of Weed and Sadness
Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc Sportello like a man permanently one step behind his own thoughts (I think I read that somewhere, and if I didn’t, well I’m brighter than I remember being). He’s a private eye who is motivated by hunches, half-measured ideas, and odd boat innuendos trying to find out the truth about, well, a little bit of everything. Doc’s no hero, just a man trying to keep his wits about him as the ground continuously shifts beneath his dirty hippie feet. One of Joaquin’s greatest strengths as an actor is his ability to lose Joaquin the man behind the mask of his character, in this case it’s the good Doc Sportella. A character he often has to balance between burnout and brilliance (well semi brilliance…sometimes…okay, on occasion).
2. The World Is Melting, and You Can Feel It
Inherent Vice takes place in 1970 Los Angeles, a place that feels both real and imagined. The hippie dream is fading, Nixon’s America is rising, and everything is just slightly askew. It’s the sunshine peeking through the smog haze. The neon accents of the sky after dark. It’s a place where the past feels both nostalgic and rotten to the core simultaneously. And, let’s be honest, that’s kind of always been LA’s thing.
3. The Supporting Cast Is a Beautiful Freakshow Parade
Each character in Inherent Vice feels like they are the star attraction of their show. Josh Brolin’s Bigfoot Bjornsen is a cop with a flat-top haircut and a rage problem—a man who can scream at you one moment and eat a frozen banana in a rather lurid and inappropriate way the next. Katherine Waterston’s Shasta Fay is barefoot and mysterious, sly and cunning as she drifts in and out of Doc’s life on a whim. And Owen Wilson pops up as a sax player with too many secrets, while Martin Short steals scenes as a drug-fueled dentist who’s pants don’t seem to be not too snuggly secured.
4. A Plot That’s Not Really the Point
Good luck explaining what happens in Inherent Vice. There’s a missing ex-girlfriend, a boat called the Golden Fang, a drug cartel, cultish dentists, and corrupt land developers—but that’s just for funsies. There should be no expectation of sense when you are dealing with a Thomas Pynchon novel. And it seems like that’s exactly why Paul Thomas Anderson took on this project.
5. It’s Funny—Until It’s NotAnderson directs Inherent Vice like a comedy he refuses to let you laugh at for too long. The humor comes in flashes: Doc mumbling his way through a confrontation, Brolin angrily ordering pancakes in Japanese, Martin Short’s wild-eyed madness. But underneath it all is a slow, aching sadness—the sense that something good is slipping away, and no one can stop it. It’s a punchline with no joke. Hunter Thompson once said something about a tall hill and a high water mark. Seems appropriate here.