Do not boogie with this Doc

INHERENT VICE (2014)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Paul Thomas Anderson has metamorphosed into an eccentric director of late. His last film, "The Master," was a puzzling and perplexing work that aimed to be far more ambitious than anything he had created in the past. Nothing wrong with that but it was not a complete dramatic success for me, though certainly watchable and fascinating. "Inherent Vice" is puzzling, perplexing and downright obnoxious in its attempt to be a Southern California noir comedy but the noirish ambitions are muted and the comedy is not fittingly humorous.

Joaquin Phoenix (in yet another role that redefines idiosyncratic) is Doc, a low-rent private detective who spends more time smoking pot than solving cases. His ex-girlfriend, Shasta (a truly bewitching Katharine Waterston), inexplicably tells Doc to help prevent the kidnapping of her newest boyfriend, a wealthy real-estate developer named Mickey Wolfman (Eric Roberts) - he will apparently be kidnapped by his wife who plans to have him committed to an insane asylum. I say inexplicably with regards to Shasta because Doc is an incompetent detective who is ready for nap time. Situations spiral from bizarre to the terminally weird, but not in the David Lynch manner or even the Robert Altman vein of "The Long Goodbye" (one of a few direct inspirations for this film). There is the Joe Friday-type, Detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), who expects Doc to act as informant. To make matters worse, the whole LAPD hates Doc and pushes him around on occasion. There are many more characters floating in and around this mess, including a coked-up dentist (Martin Short), several Nazi bodyguards, massage parlors where the girls have sex at inopportune times, a schooner called the Golden Fang, and Brolin's ice-cream-sucking popsicle detective literally eating marijuana while busting down entrance doors to Doc's hippie-loving existence. Shasta also pulls a disappearing act, or maybe not, but it will barely register to anyone trying to follow this nutzoid screenplay. Not even the most unreliable of narrators, a girl named Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), can help us. The humor is also strangely absent.

Robert Downey, Jr. was originally cast as Doc and he would've made this film far more fun. Joaquin Phoenix has been misdirected by Anderson twice now, but this time the actor gives a performance that is the equivalent of an endurance test, like pins slowly scratching a blackboard. Phoenix is also miscast, seeming far too intellectual with those penetrating eyes and severely mountain-sized mutton chops to play such a nitwit like Doc. Except for one moment where Phoenix fakes a scream, he is either too stoned or too unintelligible or both. Same with the rest of the cast - I like eccentric characters as long as they contain a form of humanity. These characters, based on Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel, are cartoonishly ghastly creations who whisper secrets that only they can comprehend - we are left in a muddle of a puddle.

In terms of creating a sustained mood and a very specific time and place, Paul Thomas Anderson has managed that as well as anybody could. The atmosphere of Southern California exists in a haze and maybe that is his point - marijuana haze is all there is in this early 70's tale and Doc breathes it in aimlessly. But there are slivers of something more emotionally grounded, particularly Shasta who has one erotic romp with Doc that will remind many of Anderson's "Boogie Nights." Even in Anderson's beautifully sustained long takes, nothing clicks and we sense something's amiss. Some may find this absurdly hazy movie intoxicating - I found it stultifyingly suffocating.