Inherent Vice: more marijuana misfire than stoner classic

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/26/inherent-vice-joaquin-phoenix

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Three viewings in and I’m still not at all sure how I feel about Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. But this has been true for me of all his recent movies. I thought the first half of There Will Be Blood was masterly film-making, and the second half was bogus, meandering, poorly workshopped tripe that couldn’t find the way to its own exit. I think The Master is a cold, self-effacing masterpiece, but it took me more than 10 viewings to come around to that opinion.

With Vice, I find most of the comparisons that critics are making unhelpful. The Big Lebowski and The Long Goodbye, the two foremost stoner-noirs, seem to have been more useful to Thomas Pynchon in writing his novel than to Anderson in confecting his movie. Anderson himself isn’t much help, really, citing some contested middle ground between the high-and-low hyper-noir of Kiss Me Deadly, Cheech and Chong’s Up In Smoke and the joke-howitzer approach of the Zucker brothers.

Well, let me have a stab at it. I first feel the influence of the long-lost hippy-noir Cisco Pike, in which ex-jailbird Kris Kristofferson, living in a dilapidated blue-collar LA beach town (Venice) in 1970 with all his 60s dreams in ashes, is coerced into selling 10,000 bucks-worth of marijuana by dirty cop Gene Hackman. These two have near-exact analogues in Joaquin Phoenix’s stoney Doc Sportello, with his William Kunstler sideburns, and Josh Brolin’s LAPD detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, who comes on like a jaded, faded version of his idealistically corrupt 1949 cop in Gangster Squad, and who rocks a brutal HR “Bob” Haldeman buzzcut to one-up Phoenix’s muttonchops.

Elsewhere, I detect echoes of various misfires, failures and manic-depressive comedy one-offs instead of those masterpieces others are citing. I see more of The Two Jakes in Vice than I do of Chinatown, and more of Tony Richardson’s 1965 black comedy The Loved One (particularly in Martin Short’s scenes) or Jack Smight’s leaden Ross Macdonald adaptation Harper from 1966, than of anything by Roberts Aldrich or Altman (whose chaos was always controlled, never chaotic). As for the laughs, I’m thinking of all those madcap 60s comedies made by aged squares who fundamentally misunderstood the 60s: Skidoo and Don’t Make Waves come horribly to mind.

But this is how it is between me and Anderson right now. Something happened to his film-making after he understudied for Robert Altman on A Prairie Home Companion in 2006, and I think he has yet to process it fully. I wonder if Inherent Vice will ever succumb to the kind of siege I so determinedly mounted against The Master, but I do look forward to our next few encounters – because, honestly, I love a movie that puts up a good fight.