Paul Thomas Anderson has a habit of making motion picture masterpieces, and Joaquin Phoenix has a habit of starring in them. It comes as no surprise that their second collaboration Inherent Vice continues their respective runs of quality, in spite of being something of a departure for both, a shaggy dog mystery that demands more of them comedically than any of their previous work. For PTA, this means letting the delirious dialogue (PTA adapted this story from Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel) take the front seat over his impeccable visual sensibility, allowing for long stretches of the movie to showcase his stable of gifted performers absolutely crushing squirrely patches of dialogue only to have those sequences punctuated by comic tableaus where the camera pulls back and captures manic movement in either a slowly gliding or completely still frame. For Phoenix, this means disappearing into a role yet again, but doing so in the service of Doc Sportello, perpetually stoned private detective, allows him to embrace a greater degree of comedy, getting bigger laughs on subtle eye movement alone than the entirety of much of 2014’s comedic output.
And the movie has no shortage of absurd character for Sportello to react to, as Anderson has populated the fringes of this film with ringers both recognizable (Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short, Jena Malone & Owen Wilson) and relatively unknown (there are breakout performance here from Hong Chau and Katherine Waterson) and every performer in the movie handles their dialogue and performances with aplomb. In particular, Waterson’s work as Sportello’s ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay helps peel back some of the story’s more emotional layers, with a pivotal scene between herself and Phoenix that is as good as any in a film released in the past calendar year. Also worthy of special commendation is Josh Brolin, whose performance as Detective “Bigfoot” Bjornson manages to toe the line between absurd and melancholic as he weaves his way in and out of the twisty narrative – stop me if you’ve heard this before, but there’s a scene in the late stages between himself and Phoenix that is as good as any in a film released in the past calendar year.
This being a PTA movie, it’s far from a purely comedic romp, and is in fact the continuation of his apparent desire to chronicle every era of American life with a definitive portrait. Whether it was Boogie Nights capturing the ‘70s segueing into the ‘80s, There Will Be Blood capturing America in its developmental stages or The Master capturing the post-WW2 malaise that allowed for a smooth-talking charlatan to take root in a troubled mind, Anderson manages to tell intimate stories that take on mythic dimensions. Here he’s tackling the free love and positive buzz of the ‘60s giving way to rampant paranoia and incomprehensible levels of corruption in every aspect of society.
And if you hold onto that notion, the labyrinthine plot that unfurls before you won’t be as confounding as it has been for some audience members. There’s a very purposeful level of obfuscation happening here of simple storytelling (not so different from another beach bum noir masterpiece, Altman’s The Long Goodbye), as the story quickly spirals from Fay asking Doc to seek out her missing boyfriend to include the FBI, LA police, millionaire land developers, white supremacist motorcycle gangs and a shadowy organization that may only exist as a front for a consortium of dentists to launder money. But I suspect repeat viewings will help to hone in on the emotional center of the film, a portrait of a relationship as mired in distrust and a palpable sense of ineffable loss as the era being ushered in by film’s close.
Don’t allow yourself to get wrapped up in the specifics of how each particular connects to the story, instead let yourself to be swept away in a haze of blissful comedic paranoia as Doc struggles as mightily with the implications of each subsequent discovery as we do. You’re in as sure of hands as we have in American cinema with Paul Thomas Anderson, and the pot-fueled plate-spinning act that he pulls off here is one of his most impressive. Call it melancomedic, a film that acts as a high-powered fan that starts to dissipate the thick haze of good feelings to reveal the darkness that awaits us beneath.
