Joaquin Phoenix does a ton of drugs while trying to unravel an incomprehensible mystery in the new movie from the director of There Will Be Blood . And it’s great.
Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice
Warner Bros.
Doc Sportello, the scraggly, stoned hero of Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie Inherent Vice, finds himself in trouble the way most noir heroes do. There's a girl, and she says she needs help, and he's willing to give it, even though he knows better.
Doc is a private eye living where all great private eyes do, in Southern California, but he's no cool, cynical Humphrey Bogart type. He's got more in common with the fumbling, postmodern detectives of The Big Lebowski and The Long Goodbye, who get entangled in crimes rather than unravel them. He's more hippie than hard-boiled, lurching through the movie, which is adapted from Thomas Pynchon's novel of the same name. As played by Joaquin Phoenix, sporting an untamed tousle of hair and muttonchops, Doc is the kind of guy who perpetually peers blearily out from under droopy eyelids. It's 1970, and the world he's looking at has gone a little nuts, so the decision to not see it clearly doesn't seem like such a bad one.
Anderson's last two movies were sweeping, enigmatic epics — The Master and There Will Be Blood, movies that burn themselves into your brain and that feel like they were made in a new, strange sort of cinematic language. Inherent Vice isn't another one of those. It's a daffier venture, like Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love, looser and friendlier, but not easier to dismiss. It's a movie full of convoluted conspiracies and dumb jokes, but there's a keen sense of concern underneath the surface that the drugs and the shenanigans will run out, and the characters will be caught by harsh, sober reality and all the bad things it contains.
Warner Bros.
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