Paul Thomas Anderson’s highly anticipated adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice has continued to gain critical acclaim since its New York Film Festival Premiere. Both the source novel and film reference elements from Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown… but never truly cohere, thanks to the thick layer of pot smoke that envelops the story and its protagonist, Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix). In his quest to make sure his ex–old lady Shasta (Katherine Waterston) is all right, private detective Doc runs afoul of a disappeared real-estate mogul (Eric Roberts), a drugged-out dentist (Martin Short), a reluctant narc (Owen Wilson), and an overzealous LAPD officer (Josh Brolin)—just to name a few.
More than capturing the spirit of the book, Kent Jones argues that the film encapsulates the feeling of the early Seventies: “With Inherent Vice, Anderson brings us tangibly close to the colors and moods and dream horizons of America in the days of Hawks and Doves. We breathe its air and move with its remembered gesticulations at its peculiar pace. And as we settle in with Joaquin Phoenix’s restlessly brooding Doc Sportello, we become attuned to his stoned intuition that all appearances are illusory, fragile, temporary, hence that there’s a hidden reality to be penetrated.”
