Inherent Vice

Maybe we all misjudged Paul Thomas Anderson.

His filmmaking is so rigorous that it's easy to believe that his ideas are equally so.  But let's take a quick spin back through his filmography.  "Hard Eight," his debut, was basically a tragic character study.  "Boogie Nights," his sprawling tour through the changing porn industry, has been understood, if not appreciated, by college bros the world over.  The next one, "Magnolia," was admittedly more abstract.  But it's packed with monologues in which the characters come right out and say what they're thinking.  It's fundamentally a big, emotional movie--hardly the cerebral mindfuck of a "2001."  The following two films, "Punch Drunk Love" and "There Will Be Blood," are wonderful, terrifically made films.  But they're fairly slight character studies, more interested in mood than in answering the Big Questions.

That brings us to "The Master," a movie that's admittedly a lot more inscrutable.  I felt it was about the limits of man's ability to control his animal impulses.  Clearly, it's also yet another Anderson movie about a particular moment in time for California--this time, the post-war years of the 1950s, when America lacked the vocabulary to deal with the horrors of what it had just gone through.

There's also a much simpler reading of the film.  When Marc Maron asked Anderson to describe each of his films in a few words--a facile question that Anderson had surprisingly little trouble handling--he chose to call "The Master" "a love story."  This should clarify things for anyone who missed the homoerotic subtext of Phillip Seymour Hoffman singing Joaquin Phoenix "I Want to Get You on a Slow Boat to China."

Still, in the wake of "The Master," it was reasonable to expect that Anderson would come back with another tough read.  This notion was only reinforced by the fact that the film was an adaptation of a Thomas Pyncheon novel and preserved much of the novel's labyrinthine plotting.

But as "Inherent Vice" unfurls, the viewer becomes increasingly aware that all the plot twists and complications don't really matter.  This is a Robert Altman movie, a film with a fun, hang out vibe that has casual moments of profundity.  It's ultimately about the moment when The Man started co-opting the dreams of all those infamous hippies.  The sprawling story only serves to bring in all the elements that conspired against their envisioned utopia: capitalism, racism, sexism.  And, of course, since we're dealing with hippies, bad trips.

It's amazing how cartoonish and goofy the movie can be.  Phoenix's character is nicknamed "Doc."  At one point, he walks past another character and addresses him as "Doctor," receiving a "Doc" in return.  The film is filled with silly gags like that.  Some of them are too dumb to land, but in the midst of the somewhat grim plot, they can be a breath of fresh air.  Phoenix deserves a lot of credit for making the humor work.  At first I thought he was playing the material wrong, exposing undercurrent of silliness that threatens to ruin even the most hard-nosed noir.  But the whole film has the same sort of irreverent vibe.  Phoenix gets a lot of mileage out of "C'mon man" reactions to the grim characters who are trying to push him around.

And then there's the love story.  Just as with "The Master," there's a strong homoerotic subtext, never fulfilled, between two of the characters.  (And let's not forget the unrequited loves of gay characters in "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia.")  Josh Brolin plays a strong-willed detective who mourns the loss of his slain partner--ever since, he's worked alone.  If that's not obvious enough, he spends several scenes fellating Banana Pops.  Though Brolin disdains Phoenix's hippie lifestyle, the two keep getting drawn to one another.  In their final scene, Brolin points to Phoenix's cigarette and says "Give it to me."  After taking a drag, the two say exactly the same thing, a cartoonish version of the way old married couples finish one another's sentences.  Brolin then eats the cigarette and much of Phoenix's ash tray and walks off, unable to express his true feelings.