Review: Inherent Vice

City Paper grade: B+

A lazy, hazy drift through post-hippie Los Angeles, Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's novel is as diffuse as the smoke from a three-foot bong. As licensed private investigator and unofficially certified doper Leroy "Doc" Sportello, Joaquin Phoenix makes the slope-shouldered Philip Marlowe of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye look like an eight-minute egg. His method of investigating a series of interlocked disappearances and murders mostly involves showing up in the vaguely right place at the vaguely right time.
Anderson, who served as standby director on Altman's final film, draws heavily on The Long Goodbye's movie-conscious style; it's a riff on a riff on a riff. But Anderson's not much interested in his native Southern California as the locus of Hollywood's dream factory. He's more interested in mutant surf bands and gaudy real estate developers, although cryptofascist copper Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) does moonlight as a Dragnet extra. It's a place where ranch-house brothels offer a "Pussy-Eater's Special" and even a chauvinist cop knows enough Japanese to order motto panukeiku ("more pancakes!").
Like the Coens' Miller's Crossing, Inherent Vice is the kind of movie where the first viewing only serves as prelude to proper appreciation rather than the beginning of it, although here it's less a matter of getting a grip on the unruly plot than setting it aside entirely. You probably can connect the dots, but why bother when you can bask in wayward flower girl Katherine Waterston's devastating single-shot monologue, in which her nudity is far from the most revealing thing? Or savor Martin Short's turn as a twitchy "dentist" catering to a wealthy, drugged-up clientele? The plot of Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep famously stumped adapting screenwriter William Faulkner; Anderson doesn't even try to untangle Pynchon's twisted skein.