Inherent Vice is a legal term, used in marine insurance, which acknowledges that everything contains its own seed of disaster and that what can go wrong probably will. Eggs break, glass shatters and 1960s hippie dreams eventually run aground on the rocks of Altamont and the Manson trial. The denizens of Gordita Beach make antic hay amid the ruins.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a gaudy unravelling, chasing the threads of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel. Here is a film that is as shaggy and as ostensibly wayward as Joaquin Phoenix’s stoner private eye, all but tripping over itself in its search for some clues. But I suspect it may be fooling us. In playing bumbling Columbo, this knows exactly what it’s doing.
Quick: let’s set up the plot before we lose the thing completely. Doc Sportello (Phoenix) is on the trail of a missing real-estate tycoon. The tycoon may just have been abducted by “the Golden Fang”, which might conceivably refer to the name of a boat, or a band, or Black Panthers, or an Indo-Chinese heroin cartel. Chaos reigns and paranoia is rife. Why is Neil Young’s Harvest playing on the soundtrack when we’re stuck in 1970 and the song would not be released for another two years? One has the sense of time dissolving, dates collapsing. Even the movie’s red herrings have started eating one another.
Possibly it doesn’t matter; maybe it’s an invitation to simply turn on and drop out. But wait, stick with it, because there is a logic to Anderson and Pynchon’s illogicality; a clear-sighted sense to all this swirling, whirling chaos. Because if the director’s previous film, The Master, charted the quest for meaning in affluent Eisenhower-era America, then this one shows where the search fetched up, in the fracturing counter-culture of southern California, where LAPD cops moonlight as B-movie actors and the Nation of Islam makes common cause with the Aryan Brotherhood. Now Gordita Beach is under the influence of Uranus, “the planet of rude surprises” and Doc wafts about on karmic thermals like a “patchouli fart”. And yet Inherent Vice proved one of the most fragrant and pleasing American pictures of the year.
Is there time to name some fellow travellers inside Anderson’s rambunctious California circus? Here and there, amid the haze, one catches a glimpse of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye; maybe even a glimmer of The Big Lebowski in the film’s wackier flights of fancy. The rogues’ gallery of supporting players finds space for Owen Wilson (as a deep-cover double agent who bamboozles even himself), Martin Short (satanic dentist) and Josh Brolin as the straight-arrow cop who longs for the respect he never received from his mother. All of them are wonky, broken; all of them are purely perfect. Anderson takes his bits of shell and shattered glass and fashions them into a wild mosaic.
