Paul Thomas Anderson’s Most Underrated Thriller Is Still A Wild Ride

Why don’t Bond villains just shoot Bond? Why didn’t the Empire plug that troublesome exhaust port? Why didn’t the Eagles fly Frodo to Mordor? There’s a tedious school of movie criticism that asks such questions in earnest — call it the CinemaSins mode of thinking — that’s borne from apparently genuine wonder as to why characters don’t act like ruthlessly rational automatons with access to their own screenplays.

Such deep thinkers were presumably confounded by Inherent Vice, a hazy neo-noir aggressively disinterested in being comprehensible. While it’s somewhat unlikely that director Paul Thomas Anderson spends a lot of time absorbing subpar video essays, the movie, released 10 years ago today, still feels like a rejection of the nitpicking that’s come to define how YouTube and social media’s most annoying elements engage with film.

Set in 1970, during the dying days of hippiedom, Inherent Vice opens with stoner private eye Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) being approached by his ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston), about a plot to commit her rich new beau to the looney bin so his wife and her lover can seize his millions. Given that the movie is based on a novel by the infamous Thomas Pynchon, you can be assured that the movie gets much, much more complicated from there.

Another woman hires Doc to find her supposedly dead husband, and he also gets tangled up in the murder of an Aryan Brotherhood goon. Like any good noir, these cases all prove to be connected, and you can throw in shady COINTELPRO schemes, a cop with an acting sideline and a grudge, and a heroin-smuggling ring fronted by a consortium of dentists among its other twists and turns.

Is it a good idea for Doc to smoke and snort while he’s on the case? Probably not. But when a director cites both The Big Sleep and Airplane! as influences, you’re going to get a certain vibe. Every scene threatens to go off the rails, whether Doc is confronting a manic Martin Short-played dentist named Rudy Blatnoyd, or Josh Brolin is dropping valuable intel while haranguing a cook for more pancakes. Doc might go somewhere and learn what he needs, or he might just get stoned, roughed up, and left completely disoriented.

A complicated movie isn’t necessarily an intelligent one, and there are a few moments where it feels like the film, despite already excising some of the novel’s subplots, threatens to come crashing down around itself. But its sheer screwiness offers up enough fun that you’ll probably be willing to sit down for a second showing someday and let the plot click into place.

Brolin as Bigfoot Bjornsen, a straight-laced but henpecked cop who alternates between working with Doc and giving him a good clubbing, is a particular highlight, but everyone who pops up for a scene or two gets a chance to be memorable. One such standout is Jefferson Mays as the head of a mental institute who’s forced to claim that a man with a giant swastika tattoo is not, in fact, a Nazi. Phoenix himself has Doc’s mild-mannered spaciness down pat, allowing you to buy the tricky conceit that the non-addled parts of his brain offer surprising insight into human affairs.

Inherent Vice is a discursive, paranoid film, one wedged into the moment when hippies were becoming passé and a freshly elected Nixon hadn’t yet fallen behind cholera in popularity. And that’s why it works, even if everyone involved, to the presumed consternation of a certain brand of viewer, is constantly making subpar, drug-informed decisions. Like the hippy era it loves and lampoons, it’s messy, memorable, and peters out to an indeterminate conclusion. America was trying to go straight in the ‘70s, but you can’t escape your past, even if you’re struggling to remember it.

The mysteries here are ultimately secondary to Doc stumbling from absurdity to absurdity, encountering addicts trying to go clean, moguls trying to atone for rent gouging, and spies trying to come in from the cold. Maybe it’s letting Anderson and Pynchon off easy to say that Inherent Vice is purposefully muddling, but it feels appropriate given how many of its characters are lost in the drift of their own lives. It’s a very funny film, but it’s also clear that the march of time has left our hapless heroes with a lot of regrets and not many avenues for solving them. For all its slapstick silliness, then, Inherent Vice ends up feeling surprisingly human, in all the messy ways people who wish characters would just smartly slink out of haunted houses should see on screen more often.