Inherent Vice review

Quite a few movie have danced a limbo to the 70s in the past decade or so and yet none quite get there like Inherent Vice, a film that goes so far beyond its roots, references and inspirations that it passes straight through the looking glass and becomes an almost futuristic reflection of today. This is the past as present, a radical idea given that this is usually the job of science fiction, and what's so exquisite about Paul Thomas Anderson’s seventh feature is that it's a film about the early 70s that’s steeped in the early 70s that manages to recontextualise the early 70s in a way you can't do with pure pastiche.

The touchstones are easy enough to see, the biggest fish in the barrel – after Roman Polanski’s Chinatown – being Robert Altman’s almost gonzo take on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. There’s also the spectre of The Big Lebowski, which is only a touchstone because Thomas Pynchon most likely saw it before writing Inherent Vice, the novel, which came out five years ago, a late entry in the now 77-year-old writer’s career. But, though it probably wasn’t on anyone’s mind, the film it most closely echoes is Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S Thompson’s hippy-aftermath memoir Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

Inherent Vice is very much a film about aftermaths, set at a time when America was seemingly on such a saccharine high, slugged by the triple whammies of Vietnam, Altamont and Charles Milles Manson, who is the unseen other Lebowski of this particular absurdist comedy. Indeed, our hero, Doc Sportello, a private eye inhabited by the mutton-chopped and wholly uninhibited Joaquin Phoenix, is himself an aftermath, deserted by cute wastrel Shasta Fay Hepworth (the incredible Katherine Waterston). Shasta returns with a story to tell, a convoluted and colourful one that competes with The Gemstone File and all the best conspiracy theories of the era.

Doc gets stuck in, getting on the trail of a ruthless property developer (which is mostly where the Chinatown references come from) and his wife’s plan to put him away, but though the story often becomes clouded, it never becomes clownish. This is film noir seen through several refractions: in style, in telling, in substance. Though it recalls The Big Sleep in its compelling yet bewildering shaggy-dog intrigue, and almost certainly has some traces of the John Holmes porn spoof The Jade Pussycat (recreated perfectly with Mark Wahlberg for Boogie Nights), Inherent Vice plays games with the traditional notions and expectations of voiceover, at the same time being tricksy with Doc’s visual point of view, presenting hallucination as fact and possibly vice versa.

How this comes together is quite something, and a big departure for PTA, who brings is focus down to tight, intimate shots a world away from the 70mm vistas of The Master. In a strange fell swoop, PTA gets the intimacy and paranoia of the 70s, an innocent time in so many ways and yet steeped in the fallout from so much 60s madness, from JFK to Haight-Ashbury and Cielo Drive. The oft-noted father-son dynamic has gone, but as with Boogie Nights, The Master and Magnolia, this is still a story about a place – California – and American history, but this time there is something surprisingly and unexpectedly political buried beneath the often hilarious stoner humour*. 

And just as Thompson lamented the high watermark of America’s thwarted countercultural revolution, PTA transforms Pynchon’s novel into a nostalgic throwback to the organic 35mm wonders of the past. With the added benefit of music by Can, Neil Young and Sam Cooke, it echoes the heady days of the early indie revolution, films like Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, in its simplicity. It also, though, taps into the urgency of Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, using fiction to question modern issues such as gentrification and corruption, while, as in The Master, this is also an exploration of yin and yang, with Doc becoming obsessed with Josh Brolin’s square cop Bigfoot Bjornsen and vice versa, shadowing the controversial last act of PTA’s 70mm epic – did that happen or not? – with psychedelic touches throughout. 

As Bigfoot might say, it goes groovy on us. Then again, The Carpenters, the sirens of their times, saw it coming: in Inherent Vice it’s yesterday once more.

*By which I mean the stoner humour of Gilbert Shelton...