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Inherent vice viooz1/13/2024 The supporting cast is made up of an eclectic blend of stars and character actors. Together, Phoenix and Brolin are perfect foils that help to really define and expose the finer details of one another's characters, while on the surface, their 'dirty hippie vs square cop' verbal sparring provides some of the film's best comedy. The acclaimed actor brings spontaneity and freedom to Doc, giving the character off-beat ticks and mannerisms wrapped in a stoner's stare, with a general disposition that's more authentic and enjoyable than the stoner/burnout/hippie caricatures most actors try to create.ĭoc is cool and fun and oddly wise and insightful in his befuddlement - the latter quality showing through in his interactions with Josh Brolin's tightly-wound and rigid lawman, "Bigfoot," which Brolin plays with square-jawed bravado. Reuniting once again after their deep (and many would say obtuse) character study, The Master, Anderson and Phoenix strike a more playful rapport in this film. The cast is a solid collection of actors, led entirely by a wildly and woolen Joaquin Phoenix. (Multiple viewings only get better with a film like this.) The score from Radiohead guitarist (and PTA collaborator) Johnny Greenwood gives the movie both a steady pulse and a hypnotic rhythm that grabs you and sweeps you up into the trance-like atmosphere of Doc's doper world. Scene-for-scene, the movie is a fun (often funny) and odd little odyssey that reveals a lot of sophisticated (and some very raunchy) humor packed into nearly every moment - if one is watching and listening close. Martin Short and Sasha Pieterse in 'Inherent Vice' It's a hard feat, but Anderson manages to create the sensation of being dazed and confused without any of the visual gimmicks often used to create psychedelic sensation. In short: after 148 minutes of watching people talk, you may walk out of the theater with little idea about how this mystery got solved, or what it was all about in the first place. Like our addled protagonist, we are left fumbling to recall which important names go with which faces baffled by certain terms that are repeated in contradictory accounts ("The Golden Fang") and are left generally wondering whether Doc - or the other dopers he meets - is truly analyzing real concepts and clues, or getting lost in some hallucination about what's going on. The real trick of Inherent Vice (in both Anderson's directorial style and script work) is how convoluted and foggy the narrative becomes, even though it is ostensibly one scene of conversation following another. That's not to say that Anderson has crafted an "easy" film - far from it, actually. "Squares"), without letting those deeper cultural or historic concerns distract from the main narrative at hand. With some smart mis-en-scene composition, Anderson creates a whole subtext about the warring sides of American culture in the '60s-70s transition ("Hippies" vs. Along with the dirty world Doc travels in, we get interplay between the button-down, drab-colored formality of American culture in that era (cops, lawyers), versus the more naturalistic, psychedelic and (at times) sexualized aesthetic of the counter-culture movement (dopers, hippies). Sticking closely (but not entirely) to Pynchon's 2009 novel of the same name, Anderson follows the writer's lead, stripping his usual poetic landscape art visual style down into a very basic, grainy and grungy visual palette (created by Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood cinematographer, Robert Elswit). While the film will have very limited appeal for casual moviegoers, Inherent Vice is great genre entertainment for intellectual and/or cinephile types. Like a match made in high-minded artistic heaven, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson ( The Master, There Will Be Blood) takes on a novel from elusive author Thomas Pynchon and turns its noir detective tale into a hilariously subversive deconstruction of '60s-era culture (and counter-culture).
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