Inherent Vice (MA). Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Owen Wilson, Eric Roberts. 149 minutes
In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his drug-addled evisceration of the American Dream, iconoclastic author Hunter S. Thompson lamented the evident failure of the 1960s counterculture. Just five years earlier — says Thompson's avatar, Raoul Duke — in San Francisco, heartland of the hippie zeitgeist, 'there was madness in any direction, at any hour … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning …'
There was, Duke continues, a 'sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil … We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave … now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.'
A similar lament can be heard between the hazy lines of American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film, Inherent Vice. An adaptation of a shambolic Thomas Pynchon crime novel, it is set in Los Angeles in 1970, at a time when the idealism of hippie culture has begun to collapse under the weight of its own excesses, and of a conservative status quo too corrupt and brutal to withstand.
Its antihero is private investigator 'Doc' Sportello (Phoenix), an aging stoner who is enlisted by his ex, Shasta (Waterston), to foil a plot against her lover, real estate magnate Micky Wolfmann (Roberts). Shortly afterwards, Wolfmann and Shasta mysteriously disappear. As Doc muddles his way through the case, he finds himself pitted against crooked cops and violent criminals alike.
The film is a virtuoso stoner epic that owes as much to Cheech and Chong as to noir filmmakers like Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly). Anderson, the indie auteur behind such gems as Boogie Nights and Magnolia, captures an utterly weird and hilarious performance from Phoenix, who mugs and mumbles his way through the film — sometimes to its detriment, given the complexities of the plot.
As a matter of fact, the at-times incomprehensible plot has been the biggest knock against the film. But Inherent Vice has plenty to offer patient (and perhaps repeat) viewers, especially fans of Anderson's densely layered writing and bravura directorial style.
As