Inherent Vice

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