Inherent vice preview9/15/2023 ![]() ![]() The more Doc digs (while appearing throughout in his own succession of disguises and alter egos), the more the plot doesn’t so much thicken as spread out, like the city itself, stretching infinitely toward the smoggy horizon. girlfriend, Penny ( Reese Witherspoon) Coy’s reformed-addict “widow,” Hope (Jena Malone) and the unstable rich girl Japonica (Sasha Pieterse), whom Doc recovered in a long-ago teen runaway case. Elsewhere, there are more distressed damsels and femme fatales than you can shake a joint at, including Doc’s on-again, off-again assistant D.A. Feelgood (a delirious Martin Short), while the presumed-dead “surf sax” musician Coy Harlingen ( Owen Wilson) may actually be an alive-and-well student agitator named Rick or a police informant known as Chucky - or, quite possibly, all and none of these things at once. A nefarious entity calling itself the Golden Fang may be a blacklisted movie star’s personal sailing vessel, an Indo-Chinese drug cartel, or a syndicate of tax-dodging dentists fronted by a coke-snorting Dr. Pynchon and Anderson’s world is a fluid, shape-shifting one in which every conversation is an exercise in doublespeak and people change identities as frequently as they change their clothes. It’s the start of a pretzel-shaped trail that snakes across the Southland from the rolling surf to the concrete “flatlands” east of the 405, and from low-rent petty criminals to the corridors of government power (i.e., bigger criminals), and where nothing is as it first - or even secondarily - appears. And before Doc can so much as follow a lead, Mickey - and Shasta - promptly vanish into the ether. She’s the obligatory woman in trouble who sets “Vice’s” psychedelic Raymond Chandler plot in motion, showing up unannounced on Doc’s doorstep spouting claims of a conspiratorial plot involving her current lover, a deep-pocketed real-estate magnate named Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), whose wife may be angling to commit him to a loony bin. That includes Shasta Fay Hepworth (leggy, lissome newcomer Katherine Waterston, daughter of Sam), an ex of Doc’s for whom the flame still burns. Indeed, in “Inherent Vice,” everyone is hiding out from something. But then, as Pynchon writes, American life is “something to be escaped from” - a line Anderson repeats verbatim in the film - which means good business for PIs and drug dealers alike. ![]() (Pynchon modeled the fictional South Bay town on Manhattan Beach, where he lived in the late ’60s during the writing of “Gravity’s Rainbow”).Īmong the locals is Larry “Doc” Sportello ( Joaquin Phoenix, sporting Groucho Marx eyebrows and Elvis sideburns), who runs his private-eye business out of a medical office and seems to spend considerably more time scoring grass than solving cases. The year is 1970 and the place Gordita Beach, a fragile ecosystem of surfers, psychics and sandal-clad shamuses in danger of disappearing from the map. If “Inherent Vice” couldn’t, on its surface, seem to have less in common with Anderson’s previous pic, the fictionalized Scientology origins story “The Master,” it is, just beneath, another sympathetic portrait of wayward souls clambering for solid ground in war-torn America (albeit with the relative optimism of the ’40s replaced by a blanket of Nixonian paranoia). But a devoted cult awaits the Warner Bros. Not for all tastes (including the Academy’s), this unapologetically weird, discursive and totally delightful whatsit will repel staid multiplex-goers faster than a beaded, barefoot hippie in a Beverly Hills boutique. ![]() Freely but faithfully adapted by Anderson from Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 detective novel - the first of the legendary author’s works to reach the screen - Anderson’s seventh feature film is a groovy, richly funny stoner romp that has less in common with “The Big Lebowski” than with the strain of fatalistic, ’70s-era California noirs (“Chinatown,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Night Moves”) in which the question of “whodunit?” inevitably leads to an existential vanishing point. The good-vibing ’60s are slip-sliding away in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice,” and along with them a certain idea of pre-Vietnam, pre-Manson California life - of boho beach towns and uncommodified counterculture soon to be washed away by a tsunami of gentrification, social conservatism and Reaganomics. ![]()
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