Inherent Vice

'Inherent Vice' is the next feature film from Paul Thomas Anderson and you can tell. It boasts a great soundtrack, brilliant acting and a very convoluted story as it tells the story of a private detective (Phoenix) as he investigates into the disappearance of a former girlfriend.

The screenplay is very confusing. It is hard to follow and purposely so as it introduces many characters and multiple stories but I have heard that this aspect of the screenplay is very true to the original source material. All I could do was admit that the film was too bewildering and to enjoy the many jokes and humorous situations.

Joaquin Phoenix is tremendous as the main character Larry "Doc" Sportello. He is complimented with a great supporting cast such as Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro.

Overall, 'Inherent Vice' is not a typical popcorn flick and I was very confused by the overwhelming plot.

★★★½

I kind of feel that Anderson lends himself to a film like this. He uses a lot of extreme wide angles and if you ever smoked a little dope in college the world looks a little like when you mount that 18mm on your SLR. His choice of lenses lends itself to telling the story of a guy like Doc without going over the top ala Fear and Loathing and making it a little too blatantly FX.

The humor works in best possible dry as a martini kind of way, and it's played straight like comedy should be.

But really, the premise sold me. Take a hard boiled film noir kind of mystery and replace Sam Spade with the perpetual stoner and then watch him try to solve a mystery.

It's incoherent enough to make you believe that Doc is just a little too rocked to function properly most of the time, which is reflected in his effectiveness and decision making skills. He's smart enough to not bumble his way through it, but has gotten off the magic school bus enough to do his best possible work.

And it makes the film do that one singular thing that all movies are required to do in order to be called a success... it entertains.

And honestly it's a delight to watch. The acting was great, the director was the best possible person to take on the adaptation, and the lighting walked that fine line between naturalistic and cinematic.

I'd call it a beautiful film, but it's hard to call a movie about drugs beautiful without sounding utterly pretentious... so, I'll settle with the highest praise a movie can get... it's entertaining and a pleasure to watch.

This just reminded me of a drug-fuelled and perhaps more colourful edition of the "Rockford Files" and I didn't really love it. It starts off quirkily enough as we meet reprobate PI "Doc" (Joaquin Phoenix) who is asked by his ex "Shasta" (Katherine Waterson) to look into the possibility that her current, and very wealthy, beau "Wolfmann" (Eric Roberts) is the target of his own wife "Sloane" (Serena Scott Thomas) and her beefcake lover. Obviously if he dies, she is left in the lurch and so now he has gone missing, her alarm bells have started to ring. Not long into his rather haphazard investigations, he encounters the disillusioned cop "Bjornsen" (Josh Brolin) - a man who has disdain for just about everyone and who knows how to provocatively eat an ice lolly! He reluctantly agrees to assist and before we know it, conspiracies abound with the lawyer "Fairfax" (Benicio del Toro) and the DA (Reese Witherspoon) all concluding that maybe this disappearance is all part of an evil plot hatched by the FBI and/or the nefarious "Golden Fang" organisation. This does have it's moments, and reinforces my long-held view that dentists are the spawn of the devil, but for the most part this is just a bit too surreal for me. Brolin probably stole the show, but none of the characters are particularly well developed and there is an inordinate amount of chatter from the frankly quite pointless-to-follow myriad of personalities whose threads all begin to come together, after a fashion, as we meander towards the end of what felt like a marathon 2½ hours of style over substance. It reminded me of the days of vinyl when the stylus wouldn't quite get into the groove so it slid all over the disc annoying as it went. Sure, there's an impressive ensemble cast on display here, but in the end it all came down to some imaginatively crafted costume design and to Phoenix's "Doc" which I just didn't rate at all. Innovative and original it certainly is, but I don't think that makes this great. I'm not even sure it makes it very good.