INHERENT VICE Is a Long, Strange Trip

INHERENT VICE Review:

- Paul Thomas Anderson seems to be in the "I'll damn well do what I please" stage of his career. Okay, so maybe he's sort of always been there, in his way. But INHERENT VICE continues what Anderson's previous film, The Master, started. It feels like a free-form meditation on ... something, with Anderson mostly content to just play with his eclectic cast of characters and see what happens. Should nothing in particular result? Fine by him. That's a big difference versus the thunderous statement of purpose that was There Will Be Blood - still, to me, one of the greatest films of the last few decades. Anderson is still absolutely at the top of his game in terms of craftsmanship. INHERENT VICE is so thick with smoky/hippie atmosphere that it's practically a cinematic contact high. And certainly, the film's plot - an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel - is a neo-noir journey down the rabbit-hole that lends itself to a loose, more free-form sort of storytelling. It's The Long Goodbye meets The Big Lebowski. It's 1970, and it's the last gasp of the free-love, free-dope hippie community of Los Angeles before the times they go a'changin'. And Anderson paints this world in vivid, smoky hues - in 70 millimeter film, it all looks amazing. But while the scene is brought to life, and the shaggy-dog noir story rife with moments of tripped-out brilliance, I still wonder whether the movie is missing a certain something that could have tightened it up into an out-and-out classic. Again, it's that feeling that Anderson is content to sort of just play in this world, not so much concerned with taking the parts and fashioning them into a cohesive and thematically-impactful whole. There's a lot to love about INHERENT VICE, but it also feels like it could have offered more beyond leaving the audience feeling like they've just lived through a crazy fever-dream.

Let me preface by saying that not only am I a huge PTA fan in general, but I also have a huge affinity for sun-soaked neo-noir. I love this genre, and I love the ability it affords a storyteller to tell a free-roaming yarn where part of the point is that nothing quite adds up. INHERENT VICE falls squarely in that tradition, sending its protagonist - doped-out private detective Larry "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) on a strange, spiraling search for a real-estate mogul at the center of a SoCal crime conspiracy. Along the way, Doc encounters all manner of shady characters, corrupt cops, femme fatales, false leads, dead ends, and people who just plain want him dead.

On paper, and as I'm writing this, it all sounds pretty fantastic. And it's true, sort of: INHERENT VICE is rich with great moments and memorable individual scenes. The raggedy narrative takes the form of the film's barely put-together anti-hero PI - loosely cobbled-together, eccentric, and hard to get a read on. The film's scenes often work wonderfully as self-contained vignettes, as Doc has mesmerizing, strange, and often hilarious encounters with a motley crew of weirdos, burn-outs, and bottom-feeders. But the film also takes on a sort of self-indulgent quality, stretching out scenes long past their ideal expiration dates, and letting Phoenix sort of go off the rails in his portrayal of Doc.

Phoenix is one of the best actors working today. Maybe *the* best. But what made his performances in films like The Master and Her so powerful and effective was that his natural weirdness and eccentricity served as a layer behind a facade of normalcy, of being an everyman. In The Master he was the wounded spirit of American soldiers home from war. In Her he was the emotionally crippled soul of modern man in a world more about connection with things than with other people. Here, his Doc is just Doc - there's no pretense about who this guy is. He's a larger-than-life noir character in the vein of Philip Marlowe or The Dude. And playing that sort of character seems to give Phoenix license to just go all-out, balls-to-the-wall nutty. And PTA indulges him, lingering on long takes of Phoenix just sort of muttering, squirming, squinting, and smoking. Lots and lots and lots of smoking, with long, lingering drags aplenty. Don't get me wrong, Phoenix is great here, in his way. He's very funny. And he has the uncanny ability to say so much with just an arch of the eyebrow or a grimace. But the film perhaps goes *a bit* off the rails by indulging all of it. If you're into the whole brevity thing, then you might leave wondering if the movie's two-and-a-half-hour running time could have been cut short, for the better, had Phoenix been reigned in ever so slightly.

The movie's cast is populated with a litany of great actors. The best is Josh Brolin as square-jawed, straight-laced (at least on the surface) cop Lt. Detective Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen. Brolin absolutely kills it in this role, portraying Bigfoot as a guy who wants so desperately to be the man's-man ying to Doc's hippie yang that he comes off as oblivious to all of his own eccentricities. Brolin and Phoenix have an endlessly entertaining rapport, and the two play off each other brilliantly.

I was also really impressed by Katherine Waterston as Doc's ex Shasta - the trouble-courting hippie whose perilous relationship with shady mogul Michael Wolfmann (an entertainingly zonked-out Eric Roberts) is what initially lures Doc into launching his investigation. Waterston's Shasta is sort of the classic "out of the past" enigmatic woman, who waltzes back into Doc's life only to screw it up. Waterston does a fantastic job of making Shasta into a worthy motivator for Doc to get off his couch and back into the fray - making her into the hippie chick of a man like Doc's dreams and a man like Bigfoot's worst nightmares. There are a lot of other great actors who turn up in the movie. I wish we got more of Michael Kenneth William's black-power convict Tariq Khalil. We get a lot of Owen Wilson's recovering-addict rocker Coy Harlingen, and man, the scenes between Wilson and Phoenix are so thick with drugged-out haze that you may find yourself coughing afterwords. Wilson is always fun to watch, and though his character at times feels like a bit of a distraction, it's a welcome one. Also excellent is Benicio Del Toro as Doc's lawyer and confidante Sauncho Smilax, Esq. Martin Short pops up in a hilarious extended cameo as a loony co-conspirator of Wolfmann's. And Hong Chau is a scene-stealer as an affable young woman who happens to run a "special" massage parlor that's also part of Wolfmann's master scheme. Also of note: Jena Malone as Wilson's ex-addict wife, and Reese Witherspoon as a put-together Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball - who carries on a mismatched affair with Doc that seems to fill her with self-loathing.

Characters like Witherspoon's Kimball and Brolin's Bigfoot seem to tell a tale of a post-hippie world, in which a true-blue doper like Doc finds himself in a society that's generally become just as weird as he is. The film is set in 1970, and the hippie movement has already peaked. Doc and his ilk are soon-to-be an endangered species. The 60's are giving way to the conservatism of the 70's and 80's. The hippies have been demonized post-Charles Manson - Doc and his ilk are derided as cultists by the cops. And so Doc, with his enduring commitment to living out his days as high as possible, is the walking symbol of a dying breed.

Well, at least that's what I'm extrapolating. As in The Master, Anderson seems to sort of circle around these big themes in INHERENT VICE, but doesn't quite seem to decide what it is, exactly, that he's trying to say here. I've seen some reviews that further expand on some of the ideas I lay out above. But I think going much further is to read more into the film than what's there. Anderson, I think, gets caught up in putting forth an overall vibe of lingering, languid, stoned-out trippiness that he loses track of the big picture storytelling. The result is that the movie ends, and there's a feeling that the movie never quite came together so as to form a cohesive whole. The best noirs have a clockwork precision that informs the surface-level chaos. There are moments here where you can't help but smile at what Anderson's doing (and I haven't read the book to comment on how it works as an adaptation). You can see puzzle pieces falling into place in unexpected and funny ways. Sometimes. Sometimes the pieces just don't seem to add up. When they do, it's great. As with the slowly-unraveling revelation that Wolffmann is involved in a circular scheme, in which a cabal called the Golden Fang deals drugs and then profits from the rehab centers that the addicts inevitably end up in. But some elements of the film - like most everything involving Wilson's rocker, or the verbose, seemingly unnecessary voice-over narration - have too many moments that are head-scratchers.

I like a lot about INHERENT VICE, and it's a film that has a lot of greatness to soak in that's scattered throughout its sprawling running time. What keeps it from total greatness though is that the movie has a lot on its mind. It doesn't want to be pure, Lebowski-esque farce. Anderson seems to want to say a lot about the 60's, the 70's, hippie culture, cop culture, business culture, and the push and pull of liberalism and conservatism in modern America. I'm just not sure that he ever says exactly what he wants to say though. For that reason, INHERENT VICE can feel like a long strange trip without a true light at the end of the tunnel. At the same time, it can't be discounted, because the voice telling us this tale is one of the best damn filmmakers we've got.

My grade: B+

WILD Is Career-Best For Witherspoon

 WILD Review:

- Over the last few years, we've seen a number of "one-man/woman-against the elements" survival stories. And there've been some great ones, from the harrowing cosmic odyssey of Gravity to the oceanic adventure of All Is Lost. WILD isn't that, exactly. It's not so much about its protagonist's survival so much as it's about her spiritual awakening. Based on the memoir of Cheryl Strayed, WILD casts Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl - a woman who decides to embark on a 1,000 mile solo hike in order to find rebirth. WILD shares some elements with the recent spate of survival films - for one, it spends almost all of its screentime honed in on Witherspoon alone in nature. But in this movie, Cheryl's life is rarely in danger. What is at stake is her humanity. This is a character who's experience trauma, who's screwed up, who's wrecked her life. WILD is the tale of her trying to find a clean slate with which to start again.

Witherspoon has been on a mini hot-streak of late. She's always been good, of course, even great. But she fell off my radar for a while post-Walk the Line, only to re-emerge last year, de-glammed and dirtied-up, in the stellar movie Mud. This year, she turns in a strong supporting performance in Inherent Vice, and, most notably, she absolutely kills it here in WILD. This is the rawest and realest-feeling she's been in a film to date, and what works best in WILD are actually the small moments of struggle that typify Cheryl's journey. Witherspoon is at her best when she comically tries to begin her journey, but can't leave her home because she's completely weighed down by her overstuffed backpack. Or when she fumbles while trying to pitch a tent. Or when she playfully messes with some college kids she runs into on the trail. This is a new high watermark for Witherspoon - this is a performance all about the small moments - gestures, grimaces, stumbles, laughs - and there's a subtlety there that I wasn't expecting. It makes me look forward to seeing her in more of these sorts of parts.

I would have liked it if the movie focused in on those small moments, and let us piece together what, exactly, Cheryl was looking to escape from. But where WILD stumbles is that it sort of hits you over the head with Cheryl's backstory, laying it all on pretty thick over the course of the film's running time. We see through flashbacks how Cheryl's family fell apart - partly because of unforeseen tragedy, partly because of her own doing (drugs, cheating, etc.). The highlight of the flashbacks is undoubtedly Laura Dern, playing Cheryl's angelic mother. Dern is fantastic as always. But some of her scenes here - and just the flashbacks in general - feel a bit overwrought. Basically, the movie occasionally devolves into cheesiness, and that's a shame, because its lower-key moments are by-and-large handled quite deftly. At its best, the movie can be really affecting.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) seems to have a knack for capturing those small, humanistic moments. Supposedly he left Witherspoon to her own devices while filming certain scenes, hence the funny, naturalistic quality that colors moments like the aforementioned tent-pitching scene. He also is pretty adept at filming the picturesque Pacific Crest Trail, and showing both its beauty and the danger inherent in sections of its terrain. 

What Vallee stumbles a bit with here is tone. Again, he has so many great little small moments, I found myself scratching my head a bit whenever scenes would pop up that were more eye-rolling than thought-provoking. There's a long, strange sequence in which a writer stops Cheryl to interview her for a magazine about Hobos - despite her protestations that she's not one - that felt really off to me. There's another moment in which Cheryl becomes suspicious of a man who offers aid (with the threat of rape strongly hinted at), only to awkwardly discover that he's actually a genuinely kind, well-intentioned guy. The bait-and-switch makes a later moment, where Cheryl does in fact encounter a pair of dangerous guys - feel more groan-worthy than it should. The movie seems to constantly succumb to hitting major keys when it should be sticking to minor ones.

I enjoyed WILD a lot overall, and look forward to whatever Vallee does next. And the movie really is a showcase piece for Witherspoon. I'm just not sure if the movie 100% lives up to its promise - it has a couple moments I'd call great, but those are weighed down by too many moments that feel forced or tonally off. If you can get past all that though, there is a powerful message at the movie's core - a message about the ability of one person to start over and start fresh, and to put past traumas and tragedies behind and move forward through sheer will and determination. Even when the movie didn't completely sell me on that concept, Witherspoon's powerful performance did.

My Grade: B+

MUD Is Picturesque Adventure With Unexpected Depth

MUD Review:

- MUD is another piece of evidence in the unlikely story of Matthew McConaughey's rise from generic rom-com lead to one of the most interesting actors working in movies today. Between movies like last year's Killer Joe, and now Mud, McConaughey is now on the short list of actors whose appearance in film - especially an indie film - automatically puts it on my radar. But the actor isn't the only thing that's great about MUD. Writer/director Jeff Nichols crafts a fantastic coming-of-age tale that's like a modern-day Huck Finn - full of adventure, danger, darkness, and loss-of-innocence. It's a dark film, but also an oddly rousing one - a tale of boyhood dreams, about manhood, and love. I can't recommend it enough.

The main character of Mud is actually 14-year-old Ellis, a country boy who lives with his parents on a makeshift house-boat, along the banks of a river in Arkansas. Ellis is quiet and introspective, which makes him a good, odd-couple match for his best friend, Neckbone - a brave, smart-alecky kid who lives with his young, bachelor uncle and enjoys looking for trouble. Ellis spends a lot of time with Neckbone lately, and it's no wonder - Ellis' parents are having issues, and Ellis is eager to escape the darkness that clouds his home. One day, the two boys go to investigate a strange sight on a small island on the river - a boat that's caught up high among the treetops. The boys find that someone else has found the boat before them - a mysterious outlaw (McConaughey) known as Mud. The boys befriend him, and bring him food and other goods from beyond the island. But as they learn more about Mud and his ne'er do well ways, they increasingly get caught up in the danger that surrounds him. Many, it seems, are out to get him - the police, shady criminals - and it's all part of a strange love story, in which Mud is hiding out in hopes of a reunion with the woman who got him into this mess in the first place.

As Ellis, actor Tye Sheridan does a fantastic job, and really makes you believe in him as a boy in the midst of getting some of those hard life lessons about the way the world works. Many of those lessons come from his grizzled, gruff father Senior - played amazingly by Ray McKinnon. McKinnon is both a brute and a badass, the kind of father that, especially to a young teen, comes off as both god and devil, mentor and tormentor. He's balanced by Sarah Paulson, as his wife and Ellis' mother. Paulson has one of those oddly sweet faces that often seems to just-barely mask a darkness underneath - and that's true here. She seems like a woman who's been worn down by her husband's brooding stoicism. Sam Shepard is another actor who just knocks it out of the park in the film, playing a prickly, grumpy, shotgun-toting older neighbor who has a complicated history with Mud. Shepard is a real scene-stealer, and a total ass-kicker when called upon. Jacob Lofland is also quite good as Neckbone - his excitability a great counterpoint to Ellis' angst. Somewhat randomly, Michael Shannon appears as Neckbone's skirt-chasing uncle - it's a very un-Shannon type of role, but the actor is funny in the part. Finally, Reese Witherspoon plays Juniper, the elusive object of Mud's affections. Honestly, it's one of the best performances I've seen from Witherspoon to date - playing against type as an emotionally-manipulative and self-destructive woman.

As for McConaughey, I'm now convinced he is a lot like Bradd Pitt - at his best when playing characters who are edgy, strange, eccentric, or slightly insane. Mud is all of those things, but what makes him an endearing character is how blindly optimistic he is despite his difficult circumstances. It's no wonder the boys sort of idolize him - he's an outlaw who committed a crime of passion, and who's embraced a sort of makeshift Robinson Crusoe life on the island. He's this larger-than-life folk hero who seems genuinely heroic, and who is a gateway to a world of adventure and thrills. The ever-present smile, calm voice, and the twinkle in his eye give Mud a reassuring quality - the danger around him is very real, but Mud makes it all seem like some pulp adventure that he's a part of.

But MUD is not just about telling a pulpy adventure yarn. Instead, Nichols gets at the more grim reality behind the illusion. Ellis' learns that Mud isn't exactly the hero he thinks, and that his romance with Juniper is not exactly the star-crossed romance it seems to be. Ellis finds that love isn't quite so real or simple as he's heard. From Mud's complication relationship with Juniper, to Ellis' parents' increasingly rocky marriage, to Ellis' own shaky attempts at teenage courtship - this is a story about coming to terms with the fact that the world is a more complicated and ugly place than what we imagine as children.

Nichols shoots the film with an eye towards the scenic southern locales in which it takes place. There's a rustic, frontier quality to the film's aesthetic. Even though it takes place in the modern day, it feels like we're in a part of the country that is, in some ways, unchanged from years and even centuries past. It reminded me a little of the trapped-in-amber hills of Winter's Bone. Bottom line is that the movie looks pretty amazing, and there's a contagious spirit of adventure that permeates throughout, tinged with hints of darkness and ominous dread.

MUD is a really cool film that's both overflowing with atmosphere and character, and that also has a lot of thematic depth. Nichols (who before this, did indie flick Take Shelter) is definitely a director to watch, and McConaughey continues to have a moment where every role he touches seems to be gold.

My Grade: A-