Inherent Vice (2014)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Written by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Jena Malone
Release Date December 12th, 2014
Published December 10th, 2014
Professor Matthew Strecher defines magic realism as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe." In the case of the movie "Inherent Vice '' Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is that thing that is too strange to believe. Doc is a doped up Los Angeles Private Detective who stumbles on a massive government conspiracy involving drugs, the feds, the Justice Department, the mob, black power and white supremacists and all of it tied to his ex-ol lady Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston).
Putting together the pieces at the center of the conspiracy in "Inherent Vice" is like listening to a stoner tell you his theory about the Kennedy Assassination, it sounds completely plausible but the story teller is a tad unreliable. The conspiracy in "Inherent Vice" breaks down like this: the government works with drug dealers who introduce dope into the hippie communities of Los Angeles, get them hooked and then use government subsidies to build facilities to help clean up dopers who want to get clean, all the while brainwashing the soon to be former hippies to send them back to society as upstanding citizens.
The term vertical integration gets dropped more than once in "Inherent Vice" and it refers to a rather devilishly ingenious bit of business. Think of a sugar company that also sells toothpaste, or what if the tobacco companies began opening cancer treatment centers. Here, drug dealers run rehab clinics that are a government front for converting hippies from drug addicts back to upstanding citizens. It sounds rather outlandish but as posited by director Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon, it plays out in a way that's quite believable as something that may have in fact taken place in 1970.
The last person anyone would believe could uncover such a massive conspiracy is Doc Sportello. He is the perfect catalyst for this story because he simply doesn't seem like he could function on a daily basis, as high as he is, and yet he's quite competent and even insightful in uncovering what he seems to uncover. And yet he's not the most reliable witness as he literally has a magical voice in his head, Sortilege (Joanna Newsom)-her name is literally Latin for 'Magic'- who acts as our narrator and the curator of Doc's memories which slowly, hazily begin to form this conspiracy into a believable, even logical form.
If you met Doc and he attempted to tell you this story about the government, drug dealers, the mob. white supremacists and black power, you would never for a moment believe him and that's kind of the point. The plot, the conspiracy, it's all very believable but Doc isn't. Doc invades this conspiracy, invents it before our eyes simply by witnessing it and yet we can't really believe much of any of it because Doc is the one telling the story. That's a remarkably devilish narrative trick and one Paul Thomas Anderson pulls off with great style and panache.
The setting for the conspiracy is very real but that Doc Sportello, of all people, would be the one to uncover it is simply too impossible to believe. No matter how many times Doc turns out to be right about something we're still talking about a guy who's been stoned for years and has a magic voice in his head. How wonderful it is for this conspiracy to pulse with such life and then have a character like Doc, our hero, be the one who compromises its very truthfulness. In another movie this would be played as tragedy as an innocent character becomes disillusioned by events out of his control.
Doc is far too gone to be disillusioned, the moment he finds a piece of the conspiracy that he can chalk up as a win and walk away, he takes it. That minor victory comes in the form of Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a former doper who was being used by the government to turn up hippies to be reformed in dope clinics run by drug dealers. Rescuing Coy is the one thing Doc manages to accomplish in the film and for him that will be enough of a happy ending. Doc, you see, is as aware as everyone else that he's neither reliable nor believable enough to tell this story and have anyone believe it.
Did you know that 'Inherent Vice' is an insurance industry term that refers to a hidden defect in a physical object that causes it to deteriorate because of the fundamental instability of its components? That's a pretty great description of who Doc is to us, the audience for his story. Doc, because of his years of drug use, is fundamentally an unstable and thus unreliable narrator of events. Sure, the story is sound, even logical, but because it's Doc telling the story we can't help but be skeptical.
That's part of the genius of the movie, we love Doc and we're wildly entertained by his journey but we don't take any of it very seriously because it's Doc. Paul Thomas Anderson thus gets to lampoon early 70's corruption without the hassle of an actual target for rage or disillusionment. We get all of the fun of being a cynic while also being stoned out of our heads enough not to get down about it.
