Surely PTA’s most underrated movie, Inherent Vice is adapted by Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, a stoner reflection on a Raymond Chandler story set in LA in 1970 (shades of The Long Goodbye and The Big Lebowski). Joaquin Phoenix is hippie private eye Doc Sportello, caught up in the tentacles of multiple conspiracies which may all be one, and hoping above all that has ex girlfriend Shasta is OK. By now we know that PTA isn’t about the plot, except in so far as everyone concerned is losing it. But take another look at this 2015 movie from a 2009 book set in 1970 — with its billionaire fascist developers, its corrupt cops and scrambled racial factionalism — and ask yourself if this isn’t the most acute film about Trumpism we have seen?
It’s the mesmerizing moment-by-moment sensory power of this funny yet piercingly sad movie that resonates on the deepest level, the long unfolding takes—Doc and Wilson’s Coy Harlingen on the fogbound pier at San Pedro, the shattering reunion with Waterston’s Shasta—that soak up light, atmosphere, and behavioral beauty and accumulate a tremendous poignancy as they go.
Kent Jones, Film Comment
A delirious triumph… Intensely pleasurable… The inherent virtue is comedy: this is dreamier, more deadpan and often sadder than Anderson’s last two movies, soaked in the plaintive lilt of Neil Young, beautiful and strange… This movie is so distinct from everything and everyone else, and watching it is like encountering a higher order of film-making, more advanced and evolved. The mystery of Doc’s lost love has a freaky power, but also delicacy, melancholy and charm. I can’t wait to see it again.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Paul Thomas Anderson
Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, Martin Short, Reece Witherspoon, Jena Malone
USA
2015
English
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Executive Producer
Steven Mnuchin, Scott Rudin, Adam Somner
Producer
Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Lupi, JoAnne Sellar
Screenwriter
Paul Thomas Anderson
Cinematography
Robert Elswit
Editor
Leslie Jones
Original Music
Jonny Greenwood
Production Design
David Crank
Also in This Series
Paul Thomas Anderson’s is a risky, unorthodox cinema, flexing between grand gestures and hidden depths, but to rewatch his films is always to discover that fleeting, elusive but profound possibility of connection.
Hard Eight
Anderson's debut is a deceptively modest character piece about a veteran gambler (Philip Baker Hall) who takes a much younger man under his wing and teaches him how to play the system and win. Until things take a darker turn...
Magnolia
This deeply personal 1999 California opus is ripe for rediscovery. Mapping the emotional traumas of half-a-dozen major characters as they criss-cross the San Fernando Valley in search of either recognition or reconciliation, it's PTA's riskiest gamble.
There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson's lacerating epic about the birth of the oil age: Daniel Day-Lewis is extraordinary as the prospector entirely consumed with his own enterprise, a Trumpian figure of naked self-assertion; Paul Dano the evangelist who may be his nemesis.
Licorice Pizza
PTA's oddball courtship comedy takes us to the San Fernando Valley in 1973. 15-year-old aspiring actor Gary Valentine has the hots for 25 year-old Alana. She's bemused but admires his self confidence. It's quirky, meandering, but it sneaks up on you.
