Inherent Vice

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (2014) *

I’ve long argued that only the most visionary film directors are capable of making the worst movies. Unlike a naïve, outsider artist like Ed Wood, whose films (Glen or Glenda, 1953, Plan 9 From Outer Space, 1959) are inadvertently entertaining, sometimes wonderfully so, directors capable of creating great art are also capable of creating the most boringly didactic films. I include in that list Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear (1987), Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (2012) and Wim Wender’s Kings of the Road (1976). If George Lucas can be considered an important director after THX 1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973), the most recent three Star Wars films he directed suggest he should also be on the list.

I’m disappointed to have to welcome P.T. Anderson into our elite coterie, as I consider him to be one of the greatest living film directors. His Inherent Vice, though, based on a novel by Thomas Pynchon, is a non-engaging, suffocating, flat mess and a real bore.

In an early ’70s Los Angeles, private P.I. Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) is sent on a mission by an ex-lover (Katherine Waterston) to find and help her current lover, a real estate developer (Eric Roberts). Doc’s investigations lead him to be targeted by both the law, “Bigfoot” Bjornsen of the LAPD (Josh Brolin) and loan sharks, murderers and other associates of a ship and cartel called the Golden Fang.

Doc spends the movie in a stoned haze, the effects of which seemed to have also seeped into Anderson’s decision-making powers. Inherent Vice just lies there. Nothing on the screen generates interest in Doc; the character doesn’t change and isn’t interesting enough for the audience to want him to change. Inherent Vice‘s antecedents had similarly confusing, nonsensical plots, but they entertained in other ways. Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946) made little sense, but it had Bogart, Bacall and witty dialogue. The overrated but still worth watching The Big Lebowski (1998) had moments of inspired lunacy. Nothing in Inherent Vice feels inspired. The comedy it attempts doesn’t generate laughter; the drama it attempts (if, indeed, it does attempt it) generates no suspense. Most of the film is composed of interchangeable scenes which don’t build upon what’s gone before. Many viewers in the theatre screening I saw left throughout the film.

P.T. Anderson can be an exquisite director. His previous film, The Master (2012) contained carefully and gorgeously shot sequences worthy of Stanley Kubrick and Jacques Tati; there’s nothing like that here. Much of Inherent Vice is shot in close-ups — it’s as if Anderson has suddenly started studying TV soap operas. Many of these grungy, claustrophobic scenes are accompanied by a noodling, annoying, generic-sounding music score. Since the film also uses tracks from the ’60s and ’70s, it’s difficult to tell if those scenes use music by credited composer Jonny Greenwood. I hope not. Greenwood’s score for Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) was achingly evocative, as elegiac in its way as Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

P.T. Anderson’s films have always had a juvenile streak, usually suppressed for the story’s sake. It’s in full display here, but none of it generates laughs. A flat-topped straight arrow cop lovingly licks a chocolate-covered banana. An FBI agent picks his nose. Martin Short plays a cocaine snorting dentist. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) dealt in the same kind of institution-skewering caricatures, but that film was satirical, smart and funny.

Upon the original novel’s publication, New York magazine wrote that “with no suspense and nothing at stake, Pynchon’s manic energy just feels like aimless invention.” Considering that Anderson’s script for the film had the blessing of Pynchon, Inherent Vice is one movie too faithful to its source.

Inherent Vice also stars Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon and Benicio del Toro in forgettable roles.

—Michael R. Neno, 2015 January 19