NYFF 2014 Inherent VicePosted by Wilson Morales
As the centerpiece for the 52nd New York Film Festival, there’s a lot of riding on Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, Inherent Vice. After all, this is the guy whose last two films, There Will Be Blood and The Master were critically hailed with a slew of Oscar nomination. With The Master star Joaquin Phoenix reuniting with him on his seventh film, one expects another home run in the making. Sadly, that’s not the case here. What could have a dramatic stoner film with a Philip Marlowe like character turns out to be an uneven detective story filled with one too many red herrings and an abundance on insignificant characters.
Based on the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon and set in 1970 Los Angeles, Phoenix plays private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello. When ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) come by asking him to help her out of a jam she has with current lover Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), he reluctantly agrees. Getting back to his work habits put Doc against the police, specifically LA PD Detective Bigfoot Bjornson (Josh Brolin), who feels Doc is a stoner and a nuisance that doesn’t know when to walk away from a terrible situation. With the help of his lawyer (Benecio Del Toro), Doc gets out of one jam but puts himself in another when he takes on another case looking for a dead husband named Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson). Turns out that Coy is still alive and that this case is indirectly related to the Wolfmann case. With shady characters appearing throughout both cases, Doc is way over his head but feels the need to see it through, if it doesn’t cost him his life.
The problem with this dramedy is that one never knows where it’s going. While Phoenix is phenomenal as the lead and does a great job as a stone, it’s the rest of the cast that gets the story muddled. Everyone from Jenna Malone, Reese Witherspoon, Michael K. Williams, Martin Short, and Martin Donovan all play a role that either throw you off or puts the pieces together; although it’s quite a trip to see Short in doped-up scene. Josh Brolin is probably the one character that stands out but with each appearance, his role is less defining. While Anderson was attempting to do a lighter film, after two equally bold, compelling films, what he failed to do was a balance between what will get the audience to tune in and be entertained.
