It has me going back because I’m after what Doc is after and none of us know what that is.
We must be getting somewhere.
The camera movement is telling us as much. Slow push-ins over minutes-long conversations imply the truth is just around the corner if only we follow the leads that this guy is giving us. And the leads that follow those leads.
1970 LA is the perfect time and place for a noir. Hippiedom is over. What about it that can be used to sell stuff is being rapidly assimilated into popular culture, whether that be a buzzword like groovy, a fashion choice like shoulder-length hair or a recreational drug like the weed that Doc’s nemesis, LAPD Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen, quaffs at the film’s coda. Anything else countercultural is disposable as a creeping paranoia sweeps through the Californian beach communities soon to be demolished and replaced by high-rises.
If anything makes sense, it’s that a stoner would be trying to make sense of his place in a world on the cusp of leaving him behind.
Inherent Vice drips and aches nostalgia. That’s where it starts and that’s where it lands. Everything that happens in between is a magic trick, precision-engineered to entice you into a riddle you think you can solve even though one jigsaw piece is always missing. Then at your wit’s end, you’re abandoned, and you’re Doc, and you might walk out of the cinema but Paul Thomas Anderson has you where he wants you. Turns out you weren’t here to work out whodunit but to spend 150 minutes feeling both warm and sad and not knowing why.
And you can break it down technically, if you like. You can examine the direction, cinematography, costume, music and performances and find it flawless, if you like. But once you add it back up again, there’s always something extra, extra and elusive, that wasn’t on the ingredients list.
It has me going back and back because I don’t know what it is.
Jon Bates Writes 