Inherent Vice (2015)

Inherent Vice (R) - Noir Review

"Smoke 'em if you got 'em"

Gordita Beach, LA County, SoCal, 1970.  A stoned PI is approached by his beach bunny ex-girlfriend about a case that ends up involving surf bands, white yachts, billionaire Real estate developers being kidnapped, Indonesian Tar Heroin syndicates, Commie Black Lists, anti-subversive units of the LAPD, Dentists, kinky sex, overdose of drugs and not enough rock n roll in director P.T. Anderson's (The Master) adaptation of the infamous Tom Pynchon's famous novel, Inherent Vice.

Firstly, the acting is stupendous.  The cast is led by Joaquin Phoenix as "Doc," the bleary eyed mumbling flat foot with a spliff and a straw sunhat instead of a Marlboro and fedora.  His counter balance is with LAPD Detective "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, whose big shoes are filled with straight laced-rage and equal paranoia by Josh Brolin, bringing a much needed humor to his buttoned up meat head who likes to munch on frozen chocolate bananas.  Other associates infiltrate the screen; Owen Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short (!) and Benicio Del Toro take turns at the absurd.  But it's the femmes-(non)fatales that really shine with the leads, newishcomers Katherine Waterson sizzles with her own sensual light as Shasta the tricky ex and Joanna Newsome does a sunny double duty as a psychic friend and hippy dippy voice over narrator that really adds volumes to the post-60s ambiance.

Cinematographer Robert Elswit (BoogieNights and others) again gives PTA some knockout frames, and like Doc you may feel like someone slipped you a PCP spiked-joint filled with beautiful smoky colors that will put you on your ass, out cold.  We, however, cannot avoid the bummers, and they are not hallucinations, we think?  The manic energy of Anderson's earlier films is again missing when it is most sorely missed.  This movie is a somber downer, but that itself isn't a criticism, the story is supposed to be a fuzzy headed hangover of a meandering Noir plot, memories of the night before terribly hard to dredge up through the haze of marijuana killed brain cells.  However the red-veined eyes rarely ever impacts the lens, things are SAID and not VISUALIZED, which is a shocking misunderstanding of the book for a master visualist like PTA and company.  This film has reverent regard for the source material, and to be sure this is one of the most faithful adaptations of a book, but instead of showing plot points the movie often only druggedly slurs them.  This may make the plot over-complicated for some, extremely frustrating for others, where in the novel the clarity of the printed page helped somewhat.

The book?  As a very faithful adaptation of the words, the film often sadly misses the novel's purpose.  PTA's Inherent Vice is best when it riffs on the source material instead of sex-slavishly regurgitates it.  The more exaggerated Cop vs Private Eye relationship is great stuff, the additional slap stick and notebook gags (which sadly stop about half way through) bring needed comic relief.  The wish would be that PTA made more of those decisions instead of being 90% the page, which it is.  For instead of being able to concentrate on the film, it brings up what was necessarily removed to achieve it's almost too long run time.  The character of the places is almost gone, the surfer lifestyle mixed with the death of the 60s, the hectic surf music on the Dodge's radio dial, the post-Manson paranoia, the foggy beaches and scruffy surfers driving around in woodies and eating whole pies at delicatessens at midnight, this whole liver of the piece has been removed, and so the audience is left with the skeleton of the story with much of it's corpulent flesh shaved away, a junkie on a diet.  Since music and moving pictures is what Anderson does best, it is a double downer that the soundtrack isn't affecting or period blaring rocknroll.  Meanwhile everything else being so tied to the exact wording has hamstrung the film from the jazz-like improvisation that energized his early work or the darkly simpatico rhythms that fueled the madness of There Will Be Blood or The Master.  Vice could really have used some of those offbeat vibes, and loudly.

And yet for every bad acid trip there is a good, and every scene Waterson's Shasta appears in outshines every other, even the Doc/Bigfoot bromances (which are subtly fantastic).  The way the camera captures her, the way she embodies the poisonous image of "the ex," is obviously the focal point of Anderson's emotional reasons for making this film and wonderfully transports us to the mindset of a man hungup on a dame no matter how hard he tries.  Her couch scene is worth the price of admission alone, for the reasons of her brazen acting courage, beautiful camera work, naturalness of environment, raw emotion and savage desires.  Doc's feelings for Shasta aren't stated, they are shown, a tortuously toxic turn-on that he hides beneath layers of denial.  It is a fascinating relationship, and a wonderfully realized hippy version of the black widow from noir-past as originally envisioned by Pynchon.  It's an outstanding scene in a good film, and not the only one.  They all have great acting and direction and cinematic panache, the entire film does.  And yet the movie isn't great on its own, at least not yet.  Perhaps with more viewings, as with the Master and yet so unlike his other films, that scenes that were great will overwhelm the rest and force it's entirety to greatness. *Sad Sax Solo*  But unlike the movies whose company it wants to join, the neo-noir classics like Polanski's Chinatown or Altman's The Long Goodbye, Inherent Vice in the end fizzles like a wet zigzag joint (surprising for a writer so dedicated to fantastic endings and last words, even the book's ending has more punch).  Perhaps, with time and a little TLC, Inherent Vice will blaze brightly, heavily potent and without it's (and our) former hangups to get in the way of letting us fade into the hazy spicy smoke of a complicated good time.

7 Painted Lady Neck Ties out of 10 (GOOD)