Inherent Vice

 INHERENT VICE

Director : Paul Thomas Anderson

Year : 2015

Genre : Drama/Comedy

Rating : **

Last year, I compiled a video listing my top ten directors working in the movies today. The video contained the names of such cinematic luminaries as David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and of course Steven Spielberg. However, despite his somewhat smaller filmography, I named British filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson as my absolute favourite - and for very good reason. His pictures, which include 'There Will Be Blood', 'Magnolia' and 'Boogie Nights' are consistently inventive, enthralling and above all remarkably entertaining. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for his latest movie 'Inherent Vice'; a slow, pretentious, incoherent and worst of all boring adaptation of Thomas Pynchons 2009 cult novel of the same name.

The film stars as Joaquin Phoenix as Larry ''Doc'' Sportello; a permanently stoned private investigator probing for information surrounding the mysterious disappearance of his ex-girlfriend. To do so, he embarks on a bizarre journey complete with presumably dead musicians, narcotic smuggling, Neo-Nazi's, drug-addled dentists and of course, lethal amounts of cannabis. Working alongside Phoenix is a veritable smorgasbord of terrific American talent including Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro and (an unexpected) Martin Short.

Technically 'Inherent Vice' is as aesthetically creative and as visually stunning as any other Paul Thomas Anderson movie. It's cinematography is continually dazzling, it's editing is tight and cohesive and it is shot with a manic, hallucinogenic freneticism which not only emphasises its lead protagonists fractured state of mind but also echoes the equally psychotropic narrative of Pynchons original work.

 

However, while it may function perfectly well as a madcap, unorthodox saga on page, cinematically 'Inherent Vice' is a total mess. The dialogue throughout is mumbly, meandering nonsense that does nothing to progress the story in anyway but manages to showcase the egotism of it's creators, various characters come in and out of the of the film without ever contributing to the overall plot and the entire raison d'etre of the picture becomes so twisted and contorted beyond all comprehension that it becomes impossible to keep up with the various characters motives making it ,in turn, impossible to care. If 'Inherent Vice' had the running time of a normal movie then maybe I could have taken it as a bizarre, quirky but relatively enjoyable trip in the vein of 'Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas' or 'The Big Lebowski'. But at nearly 3 hours in length, the film isn't so much a cinematic experience - rather cinematic temazepam.

It may be true that Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who doesn't always play by the rules when it comes to conventional storytelling. But even by his own wildly nonconformist standards, 'Inherent Vice' is an arty, overblown and soporific snooze-fest that is very quickly dragged down by the cumbersome weight of its own auteurist ego and self-indulgent grandiloquence.