Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest is a convoluted mess, a hazy, neon pothead dream where perverted Scooby Doo characters druggily re-enact Thomas Pynchon’s novel. It’s dull, inconsistent, and brimming with hyper-sexual caricatures speaking in non-sequiturs. And yet, as with much of Anderson’ work, there’s something intriguing about it.
Based on one of Pynchon’s most comic novels, Inherent Vice takes place in 1970s Los Angeles. Joaquin Phoenix is Doc, a mutton-chopped, private investigator, hoping to get to the bottom of a bottomless case. Stumbling around him under various levels of opiate clouds are a collection of eccentrics and oddballs. Shasta Fey (Katherine Waterston) is Doc’s mysterious and melancholy ex-girlfriend; Owen Wilson plays a surfer saxophonist who may or may not be dead; Martin Short is a coke-addled dentist and Josh Brolin is L.A.P.D. Detective Bigfoot, the barking, tempestuous chip on Doc’s shoulder.
Lifting much of Pynchon’s dialogue and using a narrator (singer Joanna Newsom) to recite the book’s prose, Anderson nevertheless fails to make the labyrinthine plot comprehensible. Layered under the goofiness and endless interactions with nymphomaniac women are messages regarding gentrification and the exploitation of lower classes by corporations and businessmen – but good luck making sense of any of it.
Still, there’s something off-beat, interesting and funny about this playful and sun-drenched noir, where the naturalised setting is filled with nostalgia, even as the film gives self-referential winks to its own artifice.