Inherent Vice

With their many absentee fathers, robber-baron capitalists and would-be messiahs, the films of Paul Thomas Anderson portray the California Dream as an oft-repeated fall from grace of Biblical proportions. All pinned to the wall and linked together with an intricate series of colored strings, the Anderson oeuvre begins to form an alternate-history book of California as spoiled paradise, stretching from the oil field power struggles in There Will Be Blood to the millennium apocalypse anxieties of Magnolia, and now the “square is hip” conspiracy at the heart of his ramshackle masterpiece Inherent Vice. Joaquin Phoenix stars as the stoned-out-of-his-gourd private detective Larry “Doc” Sportello, who with his gentle nature and bong-rattled comprehension skills, makes for a perfect noir patsy. No matter how lost we are in the narrative, Doc is always a little more lost, never more so than when the frazzled ends of the mystery occasionally fit together.