Inherent Vice - 'its smug 70s in-joke will test your patience for stoners'

In his elevation from merely being an extremely promising film-maker to genuine auteur status something appears to have gone seriously awry with the work of Paul Thomas Anderson.

Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love were whip-smart affairs, confident, well-rounded stories which didn’t carry any portentious or pretentious baggage with them.

However, while There Will Be Blood made an astonishing impact in its first half by the final act the film had completely lost the run of itself and was relying on a scenery-chewing performance from Daniel Day-Lewis to get it over the line.

2012’s The Master was even worse, its tale of a post-WW2 cult starting up in California featured a great performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman but Anderson allowed Joaquin Phoenix completely off the leash in a movie which definitely needed more control to make its wafer-thin storyline work.

Phoenix is one of those actors who needs little excuse to go rogue and, unfortunately, the director has allowed his leading man to indulge himself again in Inherent Vice.

Based on the reclusive Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, Inherent Vice initially feels like a Raymond Chandler story set at the end of the Hippy Dream in 1970s California, which would be fine and dandy were there something approaching a story in the first place.

Granted, some of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels were nigh-on incomprehensible when it came to plot but what we have here is a stoner shaggy dog story dragged out for a butt-numbing 148 minutes. And there’s nothing more boring than sitting in a cinema for that amount of time watching people pretend to be stoned, believe me.

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Phoenix plays Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, a private detective who’s contacted by ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston, making a big impression) voicing her concern that a building magnate she’s having an affair with is about to be committed to a mental institution by his scheming wife.

Things quickly go off the rails however, with ‘Doc’ becoming involved with a hippy-hating cop (Josh Brolin), a Black Power radical (Michael Kenneth Williams), a drug-using District Attorney (Reese Witherspoon) and a saxophone player who may be an undercover FBI agent (Owen Wilson).

As if all that wasn’t enough to be going on with there are references to a mysterious organisation called The Golden Fang which could also be the name of a boat or a group of dentists, while Aryan Brotherhood bikers roam in and out of the plot which also takes in a massive drug deal.

Honestly, by the halfway point it had become clear that all these story strands were going absolutely nowhere, and very slowly at that.

Certainly there are some good things going on here. Martin Short’s all-too-brief cameo as a fun-loving dentist could have come from an Austin Powers movie, Benicio Del Toro mumbles in his usual menacing way and the soundtrack from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is as good as you’d expect.

What really irritates about Inherent Vice, though, is the all-pervading sense of smugness about the entire project, a feeling that Anderson, Phoenix and the rest of them are in on some private joke that we, the audience, will be only too happy to indulge because, well, it’s Paul Thomas Anderson and Joaquin Phoenix and surely they wouldn’t sell us a pup, would they?

Well, yes they would and they have, a great big shaggy hound of a pup in fact.

READ Paul Whitington's review:

Herald