Caught up with Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie Inherent Vice, based on a book (that I have not read) by Thomas Pynchon. It’s a long – very long – rambling incoherent movie that I’d call a complete mess if that wasn’t the point.
It’s ostensibly a gumshoe movie set in 1970 where a hipper, druggy licensed PI named Doc (who works out of a doctor’s office) played here by a mutton-chopped Joaquin Phoenix is theoretically investigating a… crime? Maybe? He’s doing something that involves crime, kidnapping, heroin, or something…
Based on reviews of the movie (and the book), this movie isn’t supposed to make a damn bit of sense which is good because I got lost in the plot and maybe thought I’d fallen asleep as missed something. But, no, nobody really seems to understand what was going on and that was intentional. You have to unload a brief case full of patience to power through this movie.
It’s kind of a comedy – there are some funny, obscure, and surreal comedic moments but they were very rare and completely random. I have the feeling that maybe they thought the movie was more consistently funny than it was… or, then again, maybe they didn’t… maybe they decided to randomly toss in some head-scratching jokes just to mess with the audience.
It’s kind of a detective story except the plot is incoherent and it keeps introducing new, unrelated crimes and characters and forgetting old ones. It’s hard to invest in a mystery when the characters and the script don’t invest in them either. There’s nothing solved…. or rather, maybe there is… but I’m not sure what part was solved… or if it had anything to do with the original case.
It’s kind of a stoner comedy except it’s so draggy that I think stoners would get distracted and bored waiting for the weird to happen. Part of the problem is Joaquin Phoenix is deeply miscast… the movie seems to maybe want to be a more serious Big Lewbowski and it needed someone a little more straight than Jeff Bridges but certainly more blitzed than Phoenix. Phoenix, for my money, brought nothing to the role… except maybe during the occasional bits of comedy where he could scream randomly or do a funny pratfall.
It’s got a big cast… Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolan, Eric Roberts, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short (?), and a few others… most with fairly small parts. Josh Brolin plays an LA cop named Big Foot who is pretty amusing but I’m not entirely convinced he was a real person. Probably was… but possibly some of his scenes were figments of the imagination.
Or maybe not. Who knows?
I wish I could recommend this movie for just being weird. But it’s impossible given its 2+ hour run time and deep desire to just be about nothing while telling an incomprehensible story that just made me wish the movie was over. And it could have ended at any point, near as I could tell, and it would have made no real difference to the story. That’s a problem.
Score: 64