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'Inherent Vice' misses the yearning and despair inside noirish shenanigans

( R ) ( Monitor Movie Guide )

'Vice' director Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the most gifted directors of his generation, but the film seems to have been concocted in a stoned haze of its very own.

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Wilson Webb/Warner Bros.
Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) and Hope Harlingen (Reese Witherspoon) chat in a scene from the movie 'Inherent Vice.'
  • By Peter Rainer Film critic

Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the most highly gifted directors of his generation and an heir, in terms of his shaggy, free-ranging style and sensibility, to Robert Altman. His new movie, “Inherent Vice,” adapted from the Thomas Pynchon novel, is a kind of companion piece to Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” and it’s the sort of failure that only a director of his talents could make – a movie about a stoner private eye (Joaquin Phoenix) in Los Angeles circa 1970 that seems to have been concocted in a stoned haze of its very own.

The Philip Marlowe-ish complications pile up along with the likes of Josh Brolin (very good as a bonkers, buzz-cut cop), Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short and, as a slinky noir vamp, relative newcomer Katherine Waterston (daughter of Sam). What the film misses, which “The Long Goodbye” mainlined, is the yearning and despair inside all these noirish shenanigans. Grade: B (Rated R for drug use throughout, sexual content, graphic nudity, language, and some violence.)

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