Katherine Waterston and Joaquin Phoenix star in Inherent Vice. Phoenix fails to convey lightness well, which make the film feel more serious than it is intended to.Wilson Webb/The Canadian Press
In Paul Thomas Anderson's new film, Inherent Vice, Joaquin Phoenix plays a hippie detective living in a laid-back beach community in Los Angeles in 1970. He has big, fuzzy mutton-chop sideburns, and often a joint in his mouth. He wakes up, goes to sleep, gets knocked out, wakes up again and meets an assembly line of eccentrics who are all somehow linked to each other and to a number of missing people.
The story is a mostly faithful adaptation of a 2009 detective novel by Thomas Pynchon, a work of serio-comic hippie noir that riffs off the L.A. detective genre of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. The film follows the quest by detective Larry (Doc) Sportello (played by Phoenix) to determine, in effect, who killed the Sixties.
The villain is a shadowy syndicate called the Golden Fang, the combined forces of big business, cops and right-wing politicos who have flushed utopian dreams down the drain, although that's more like Cheech and Chong than An American Tragedy.
Early on, Doc gets visited by an old flame, the sad-eyed, insinuating Shasta (Katherine Waterson), who is bringing him a case. She's seeing a rich developer named Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), but his wife Sloane (Serena Scott Thomas) and her lover are planning on putting him in a psychiatric hospital, and they want Shasta to work with them. In other words, right from the start this is way too complicated for a real detective story, and things quickly get worse. Soon after, Doc, who works out of a real doctor's office, gets visited by an ex-con and Black Panther member (Michael K. Williams) who wants to track down one of Wolfmann's bodyguards, who soon turns up dead – with Doc lying unconscious beside him, framed on a possible murder charge.
You remember your Raymond Chandler? Whenever Philip Marlowe gets knocked out, that's when the real action begins. In the case of Inherent Vice, things begin flying in all directions. A catalogue of standard detective tropes is offered here, scrambled and parodied. Doc has a frenemy on the police force, a civil-rights-violating detective named Christian Bjornsen, nicknamed Big Foot (for the way he comes through doors). He's played by Josh Brolin as a semi-tragic thug who has an angry, domineering wife and secretly wants to be an actor.
There's another missing man – Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a former surf-rock-playing saxophonist who is either dead or undercover – who provides a resurrection theme in the novel. Also, Doc has another girlfriend, a prim, junior district attorney named Penny (Reese Witherspoon) who has a bad-girl side. There's also a former teen runaway called Japonica Fenway (Sasha Pieterse), whose father (Martin Donovan) is a millionaire puppetmaster at the centre of things.
The characters' names are clever and silly (Dr. Buddy Tubeside, Sauncho Smilax, Adrian Prussia, Dr. Threeply) and, following Pynchon's novel, the plot runs riot with cults, evil doctors, neo-Nazis and tycoons. Recurring characters include Doc's laid-back, helpful lawyer friend (Benicio Del Toro) and Doc's little buddy informer Jade (Hong Chau), a massage-parlour madam who pops up randomly with useful info.
The trouble is, Joaquin Phoenix – whatever his eccentric strengths as an actor – does not convey lightness well (Robert Downey Jr. was once in the running for the part). And Inherent Vice, despite its references to Nixon and the Manson Family, never suggests much real weight. All this makes a funky, melancholic, medium-sized novel of 369 pages into a long, shapeless movie of 148 minutes. Even the visual gags – a nose-picking FBI agent, Brolin's detective fellating chocolate-covered bananas – are broad and juvenile. (Trust me – do not believe anyone who tells you how uproarious the movie is.) On at least a couple of occasions, the camera, from a seated person's angle, simply cuts off actors' heads in a shot.
Yes, there are some of those weirdly tender, angry Anderson moments we love. A key scene involves Doc's second encounter with Shasta, naked yet speaking as if she's disembodied, as she torments and entices Doc with stories of her sexual history. In the ranks of Anderson's strange moments (raining frogs in Magnolia, the milkshake speech in There Will Be Blood, the Slow Boat to China serenade in The Master), it's a keeper.
There's also something to be said for the use of a female voice-over narration, from a hippie psychic called Sortilège (musician Joanna Newsom). Her narration, poetically abstract, provides snippets of Pynchon's lyricism, including this description of Shasta and Doc's separation: "… each, gradually locating a different karmic thermal above the megalopolis, had watched the other glide away into a different fate." It's an up-in-smoke image which captures the emotional ache at the heart of Pynchon's story. But too often, the film gets distracted with things to giggle at, and breaks the spell.