‘Vice’ an inherently baffling juggling act
“Inherent Vice” is a stoner “Chinatown” as directed by Wes Anderson, if Wes got sick midway through and the darker Paul Thomas Anderson took over for the last acts.
Actually, only one Anderson – Paul Thomas (“The Master,” “There Will Be Blood”) – tried to wrestle Thomas Pynchon’s comic novel about drugs, detectives, disappearances and dentists into a film. He manages some deliriously off-center performances, daft writerly pronouncements and a plot that almost defies summary.
“As clear as the vodka you keep in the icebox!”
But it’s also stupidly long. “Vice” is the first real patience-tester from a director who typically works “long,” a muddle of amusing conceits and aimless, infuriating randomness.
Joaquin Phoenix is the detective in this mystery, but Doc is unlike any gumshoe the movies have ever seen. Yeah, the PI gets a complicated assignment from a dame, an ex-girlfriend.
But Doc Sportello’s challenges aren’t just hateful, ham-fisted cops, foolish Feds, shady drug traffickers and bikers. Doc’s biggest challenge may be his sobriety. He has a dazed, word-slurring “Can I trust what my eyes are seeing?” way about him. With Wolfman sideburns, glazed eyes and a Woodstock-era wardrobe, Doc is on the cusp of the hippie drug culture/“straight” America divide of 1970.
The Feds, cops and other straights may not trust him.
But “I’m only a LIGHT smoker,” he protests between joints.
From his side of the generation gap, people flock to his detective agency, people like Shasta (Katherine Waterston), an old flame caught on the horns of a blackmail dilemma, or Coy (Owen Wilson), a sax-playing surf musician and snitch wondering how the family he had to abandon is doing.
Josh Brolin is the cop they call “Bigfoot,” a two-fisted thug who labels himself a “Renaissance detective.” Sure, he confuses “descendent” for “decedent” when talking about dead people, but he’s a veteran at “civil rights violations” and takes a swipe at Doc every time they meet.
Benicio Del Toro, ironically delivering the most coherent line-readings of his mumbling career, is Doc’s dockside lawyer.
The script, ostensibly a search for a missing L.A. developer (Eric Roberts), is peppered with hookers, hippies, runaway heiresses, ex-convicts and the occasional coke-addict dentist (Martin Short).
Anderson keeps these various juggled balls in the air for 90 minutes or so, scoring Pynchon points about the breadth of the culture divide, and landing Pynchon laughs. Note how loopy everyone’s name is – Puck, Sauncho, Japonica, Dr. Blatnoyd, etc.
But Anderson loses his way, failing to thin out the novel and its overload of characters, piling scene upon scene that neither amusingly complicates the plot nor advances it.
Phoenix, however, is never less than fun as a private eye who never seems to collect payment from anybody, whose case notes are nonsensical and whose grasp of all the confusion around him is no firmer than ours. Pairing him with Wilson is one of the great moments in screen stoner history.
“I don’t know what I just saw.”
“Me neither. I don’t know if I WANNA know.”
Reese Witherspoon has a glorified cameo as a buttoned-down assistant DA whose wild side involves catting around with Doc. And Joanna Newsom, as a wholesome hippie narrator, gets most of the best lines.
Still, there’s no sense making more of “Inherent Vice” than it is. Because in the end, it’s about 90 minutes of narrative and an indulgent, meandering final hour that makes almost no sense at all.