"Inherent Vice was pretty close to my favorite movie last year, but this is the first time I've tried to write about it. I walked out knowing it was so dense I'd regret trying to decode it without a second viewing. But the feeling of it stuck with me. It's hazy and meandering, unfolding mostly like a normal private detective mystery, but introducing so many characters and motivations that I eventually had to concede that I'd lost track of what the hell was going on. Fortunately that didn't seem to matter that much. 'What the hell is going on' might be beside the point.
"Our hippie P.I. protagonist Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) has an almost Looney Tunes-esque rivalry with the closeted macho police detective Bigfoot Bjornsen (manoutoftime Josh Brolin), but I'm not sure which one is Bugs Bunny and which is Elmer Fudd. Bigfoot harasses Doc not only by making weird phone calls, taking him in for questioning and kicking his door down, but by having a SAG card and haunting him through crappy local TV ads. Both actors fully inhabit these weird characters and find ways to deftly slide into physical comedy and broad goofiness. Phoenix elicitly tiptoes around a residencelike he's in a ScoobyDoo episode, rolls himself into a ball to avoid police brutality (but gets picked up like a piece of luggage), stares in comical horror for an entire long take of Brolin fellating a frozen banana.
"You could argue that Doc is a lazy person he lives a laidback lifestyle with little regard for sideburn or foot maintenance but his adventures are exhausting. He gets bludgeoned with a baseball bat, kidnapped, set up separately for murder and for heroin smuggling. Yet, unlike mine, his drugaddled brain is able to keep straight a tangle of mysteries involving missing persons, an insane asylum, a brothel, black militants, white supremacists, international drug smugglers, a cult, a dopehead dentist, a real estate developer (Eric Roberts!) and surely other factions that I'm forgetting.
"The only obvious cinematic comparison is The Big Lebowski, another witty, tangentfilled postmodern California noir story that affectionately parodies hippieculture through its alternately clever and slowwitted stoner kindofdetective hero. But Paul Thomas Anderson steeps his in the bad vibes of early '70s period detail. Inherent Vice is deeply funny, but with a creepy fever dream undercurrent. You don't so much watch this movie as you ride it out. But in a good way." ~ Vern
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