CREDIT: WARNER BROS.
It's a combination of The Big Sleep and Cheech and Chong, and stars heavyweights like Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon and Josh Brolin; what's not to like?

LONDON — At its premiere at the New York Film Festival in October critics and audiences bestowed Inherent Vice with the oh-so-clever title “Incoherent Vice,” content to dismiss the nearly three-hour sunset noir as disappointing. These critiques do a disservice to a film that has a lot of interesting elements. The film’s plot is intentionally confusing to reflect the mindset of its protagonist and it does make a decent amount of sense by the end. Inherent Vice is worth it for the fantastic journey the audience has taken with an unforgettable cast of characters.

Inherent Vice plays like a combination of The Big Sleep and Cheech and Chong. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as Doc Sportello, an L.A.-based private investigator and bumbling doper. He is visited late night by his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterson) who comes to him with a kidnapping plot, which aims to lock up her billionaire boyfriend Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) in an insane asylum. In true film noir fashion, the simple premise becomes more and more complex, until it seems as if everyone in California is involved. It seems as if Doc is the only person with the ability to solve the case – if only he could remember the clues past the constant haze within his head.

On the surface, Inherent Vice is the most straightforward film Paul Thomas Anderson has made since Boogie Nights. It’s a detective story straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. However, anyone who knows anything about Anderson or Thomas Pynchon, who wrote the source novel, could tell you that there’s always something more lying underneath the plot. Inherent Vice is a film about longing, featuring a central character whose loneliness is ironically accented by the barrage of colourful characters he deals with on the daily.

It is abundantly clear that Doc constantly longs for a life he could never have, aspiring for both the woman of his dreams and quietly dreaming for the stability that is apparent in the life of Doc’s LAPD equal, Detective Bigfoot Bjornson (Josh Brolin). The film is a goofy, convoluted crime caper on the surface, but a beautifully subtle character piece underneath the standard noir story.

As to be expected from an Anderson film, the direction is perfect. Shot on a flat aspect ratio, which compliments the film’s vintage cinematography and colour palate, each shot brims with absolute beauty. Those lucky enough to experience Inherent Vice in 70mm projection will be delighted by the gritty texture of the film used, which creates nostalgia for a time before digital exhibition became the norm. In terms of direction and performance, Anderson’s penchant for long takes and emotional rawness is fully present. The camera lingers and closes in during the scenes where Doc questions each suspect, and flies about with him as we see the world through his foggy eyes. One scene in particular, which uses a Neil Young song as background music, absolutely stuns.

Inherent Vice is the kind of film that can be talked about for hours. This is a hilarious, loopy, yet emotionally resonant piece of work from one of cinema’s greatest working filmmakers and well-worth seeing.