Inherent Vice (2014)

* ½ out of ****

If any movie this year was set up for me to love, it's “Inherent Vice”. A hippie era crime drama directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights”, “Magnolia”, “Punch Drunk Love”) and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon and Benicio del Toro, how could it miss?

Well let me tell you....

First, make the plot virtually incoherent. Yes, I understand that the key characters are spaced out high all the time and it's supposed to be convoluted, but it is so complicated and full of sub-plots that half the time it's hard to know what is going on. Add to that the humor – it's so dark that you feel mean-spirited for laughing at anything. It is just incredibly hard to follow and almost utterly without joy – it is simply "rough". When it's over you feel like you've been through an ordeal rather than a bit of fluffy entertainment.

Not that an experience like that can't be great entertainment. When I first saw “Platoon” (1986) I felt the same – I dragged myself out of the theater. But “Inherent Vice” is not the same – it feels like something you put yourself through instead of something you experienced.

Joaquin Phoenix is good in the lead role – I am a fan and am glad he is back to star-status after his bizarre “I'm Still Here” experiment. But he doesn't play “Doc” Sportello as a sympathetic character. In fact, he looks like someone who you'd be scared as hell to meet in a dark alley. Something like a cross between a Woodstock-era Joe Cocker and a pre-conviction Charlie Manson. Trying to make a living as a doctor, which isn't easy when you're wild high all the time, and getting caught up in a murder mystery, you never know quite what to make of Doc. Or to particularly care. Given his self-destructive behavior and recklessness, it seems inevitable that he is going to come to a bad end.

I won't try to describe the plot any further – and am not sure I could if I tried. For half the film Josh Brolin is entertaining as the hard-as-nails square detective on the case, but he takes a left turn into utter bizzarro world in the second half. A scene where he eats some of Doc's grass might have been the most weirdly disturbing thing I've seen in quite some time. You can never get your feet under you here – everything that starts to compel takes that hard turn into zany before long. There were times that I felt they were trying to re-construct some of the odd pieces of David Lynch films (particularly one where Doc meets with an informant in a foggy alley) but it never comes together. 

Some are suggesting that this strange assembly will be a cult classic, one that you need to see again and again to appreciate, but unlike most cult-following films I can't imagine what additional I may glean from a second viewing.

A complete disappointment. And this coming from a fan of all the primary stars and the director. It has an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, but I offer a personal guarantee that it won't win.  The nomination is surprising, considering the lack of continuity and ridiculously complicated story.  One to be forgotten.