Inherent Vice - 2014 - NR

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Owen Wilson

Imagine, if you will, a Frank Luntzian dystopia where every time you experience art you are also forced to record your emotions in an "Instant Reponse Focus Group". You have a dial in your hand and are continuously rating what you are viewing on a scale of quality from 0-100. Ignoring the futility of quantitatively rating art, which experience would you rather experience, one where your dial is at 50 for the entire runtime or one where you are at 0 half the time and 100 the other half?

Though the two hypothetical experiences above both average to a 5/10, I'd certainly prefer the latter. Fleeting bouts of transcendence are rarer and more valuable than sustained mediocrity and I am willing to wallow through garbage for a taste of greatness, which brings us to Inherent Vice. Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson's (apparently) faithful  adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's (apparently) inscrutable novel is shaggy dog story that is lively and energetic and beautifully photographed, except for when it's not.

Inherent Vice is a slacker noir in the tradition of The Long Goodbye and The Big Lebowski, we follow our counter-cultural gumshoe, in this case "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin) Phoenix, through a labyrinthine conspiracy that will not be solved when the final reel ends. IV's lack of narrative closure is part its genre, not a fault, but without a gripping narrative the film is dependent on its vignettes consistently working; unfortunately its digressions are scattershot and the misses undermine the film's momentum.

What makes this film so hard to grade is when hits the mark, Anderson produces true 100/100 moments. A tracking shot with Can's Vitamin C playing  over the big, bright, neon title credits, Doc and Shasta (Katherine Waterston) running in the rain while Neil Young plays in the background,  A close up of Bigfoot (Josh Brolin) fellating a chocolate covered banana, the phrase "pussy eater's special", each of these would be the best parts all but a few movies I saw last year. PTA is such a talented director that it's impossible for him to make a 150 minute movie that doesn't have several awesome scenes, but Inherent Vice's ratio of awesome : mediocre is lower than most PTA fare. It's a qualified success whose occasional brilliance make this movie a must-see, which currently translates into a number of stars that neither I nor Frank Luntz can appropriately gauge.