The inherent vice of ‘Inherent Vice’

“Inherent Vice” is unlike anything you’re apt to see all year.

For most people, that will be just fine. I can’t imagine anyone randomly walking into a theater and actually enjoying themselves sitting through this 148 minute movie.

Unless, of course, that person was stoned. Being high would at least alleviate the pressure for anything in this movie to make sense. In so many ways, “Inherent Vice” feels like little more than a series of inexplicably linked events involving ridiculously broad caricatures of people, told in wildly inconsistent tones. It is the very definition of loopy.

Yet, “Inherent Vice” is not so easily dismissed. For starters, its source material is a novel by the brilliant but denser-than-dense post-modernist writer Thomas Pynchon. Best known for “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Pynchon writes massive novels with intensely convoluted plots, often in intensely convoluted sentences. They’re generally considered un-filmable, but “Inherent Vice” is at least one of his shorter, and lighter, works.

It would take an ambitious writer/director to try to bring Pynchon to the big screen and you don’t get much more ambitious than Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s the man behind such impressive films as “There Will Be Blood,” “The Master,” “Boogie Nights,” and “Magnolia.” Anderson reportedly worked very closely with Pynchon on “Inherent Vice,” so the assumption is the resulting film at least has the reclusive writer’s blessing.

As for my stoner references at the beginning of this review, they’re not just cheap shots taken at the expense of the film. Set in 1970 Southern California, the movie, and novel for that matter, is awash in drug use.

Fittingly, the lead character – Doc Sportelo (Joaquin Phoenix,) a hippie private eye – is a pot connoisseur who’s high almost all the time. That Doc spends the entire movie trying to solve an elaborate and complicated murder and kidnapping case involving drug cartels, corrupt land developers, and the Aryan Brotherhood – all while higher than the proverbial kite – is one of the jokes of the narrative. In fact, that may very well explain the silly and seemingly arbitrary nature of the story itself.

“Thinks he’s hallucinating” is the first thing Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta says about him, as she sets the wheels of the plot in motion. If the entire movie is indeed a hallucination, thanks to Paul Thomas Anderson’s absolute commitment to Pynchon, it’s a very rigorous hallucination, as contradictory as that may sound.

By the way, the term “inherent vice” is a technical term for an internal quality or flaw in something that causes its own damage or destruction. It serves as a great Pynchonian metaphor for human society, for human character, and perhaps for the narrative itself.