Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice(2014) In a traditional detective narrative, the central mystery gradually becomes clear, the individual pieces of the puzzle fit together and the protagonist inches toward catching the perpetrator by uncovering and connecting new information. In Inherent Vice, a stoned noir flick for sober viewers, you will be more confused at the end than you were at the beginning. ___ Anderson continues in the mission of his mentor, Robert Altman, and further confronts America with its true face. As he did in Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and The Master, he attempts to capture the mood and express the essence of a particular moment in American history. He uses the tail end of the flower-child era, saturated with conspiracy theories, to point out the interconnectedness of the individual parts of a system that is so complicated that it’s impossible to actually recognise or understand it. Inherent Vice is told accordingly. ___ The film is set in 1970, when the utopian ideals of the unbridled sixties are being displaced by paranoia, fear, greed and strict adherence to rules. It is the start of an age of cruel sobriety after coming down from the high of the previous decade. The sudden inhibition, fatigue and numbness is personified by private detective Doc Sportello. His blank expression, slack jaw and constant running into obstacles (literally and figuratively) illustrate a loss of contact with the changing world in which he doesn’t know what to do. Dialogue scenes are often constructed to make us unsure whether they are taking place in the same room as the people who are talking. The marijuana haze enveloping the whole film makes it impossible to distinguish between what is really happening and what is merely Doc’s hallucination. ___ There is often a lack of establishing shots and we see only the character who is speaking in semi-close-ups, never the one who is supposed to be listening. The incomplete picture of reality corresponds to Doc’s fragmented perception of reality and his inability to put facts into context. Partly due to the influence of light drugs, a lot of information escapes Doc and we similarly have limited access to knowledge due to the adherence to the protagonist’s perspective. The commentary, which is rather more of a mockery of genre conventions than a useful orientation aid, is not provided by the protagonist, but by a woman who describes what we are seeing without the cynical detached humor and fatalistic urgency of courageous noir narrators. ___ The chaos, disorder and unpredictability of the era, which is heading in an unknown direction, are reflected in several interconnected cases and the effort to solve them. In fact, each new clue leads to a dead end and only adds another layer of ambiguity (in the manner of the layering of shots with which the film begins). The investigation goes nowhere, as does the movement of the actually rather dynamic camera, which generally approaches the characters very slowly during the long dialogue scenes, hinting at a major revelation, which of course doesn’t happen at the end of any scene or of the film itself. Even more than in the genre classic The Big Sleep, in whose plot twists director Howard Hawks allegedly got lost, the plot is complicated to the point of opacity. But in this case, that is deliberate. ___ The goal is not to get from point A to point B, but to use the two and a half hours of wandering to capture the feeling that comes with loss of direction. The absence of a point is the point and Doc is another one of Anderson’s aimless protagonists trapped in a cycle of events that lead nowhere. The investigation does not serve primarily to obtain new evidence, but to portray America’s confusion as the country enters the 1970s. ___ Inherent Vice is an unfocused, dramatically aimless and, like its protagonist, slowed-down reminder of a time of fundamental social change and the end of an era (including, among other things, New Hollywood, to which Anderson often refers in his work). Despite the narrative nonchalance, stylistic unobtrusiveness (there is no gratuitous approximation of ’70s style) and the improvisational feel of many of its scenes, the film undeniable has solid directing and a creative concept that is far clearer than anything Doc learns on the basis of his pseudo-detective work. 75% (03/10/2015) (less) (more)