Warner Bros. Pictures
You can’t ever fault director Paul Thomas Anderson for being unambitious. His films are usually densely layered stories upon stories with huge casts of characters that intertwine throughout the story even if they never all meet by the film’s resolution. Anderson exploded onto the scene with his second feature, Boogie Nights, which really established his voice as a filmmaker. His next feature was the stunning Magnolia, using the layered petals of the flower as a metaphor for the film’s many layers, which he followed with a short film for Saturday Night Live. After his two film epics (Magnolia ran over three hours), Anderson vowed to make a 90-minute movie with Adam Sandler. The result was the fairly well-received Punch-Drunk Love which was followed by his Oscar-winning masterpiece There Will Be Blood (which returned him to epic territory).
While most of those films garnered much critical praise and many awards, Anderson seemed to go off the rails a bit with The Master, which won over critics but divided audiences with its perplexing and challenging storytelling and characters. Now Anderson is back with his latest conundrum, Inherent Vice, based on the book by Thomas Pynchon, which has divided critics and audiences alike. I’d like to tell you what Inherent Vice is about, but I’d probably just be better off making something up because this is a film that may have a point but I just couldn’t find it. (I felt like Joaquin Phoenix looks above after watching the movie.)
Briefly: the focal point of the story is Doc (Joaquin Phoenix), a stoner P.I. drawn into a case by an ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston). It might have something to do with the disappearance of her married lover Michael Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) or maybe it has something to do with the Golden Fang, which may be a boat, or it may be a consortium of dentists, or a group of drug lords. Or none of those things. Is Doc supposed to find Wolfmann? Is he working with the local police detective Christian Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), aka “Bigfoot”? Or he is on the trail of missing musician/activist Coy Harlington (Owen Wilson)? Is Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short) the key to the Golden Fang? And who is that annoying narrator, Sortilège? What relationship do these character have, or do they have any relationship at all? Who knows. By the time it’s all over, you’ll feel like you’ve smoked just as much weed as Doc has throughout the movie. This is probably a film that demands multiple viewings, but you’d be hard-pressed to want to see it more than once.
Which is a shame because the new Blu-ray from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is beautiful to behold. The film — and it can rightly be called that as it was shot on film instead of digital video — has a wonderful film-like quality on home video, representing the cinematographer’s 1970s color palette appropriately with a nice hint of film grain accurately representing the theatrical presentation. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack uses the surrounds sparingly, surrounding the viewer with music and subtle sound effects. The dialog is front and center, never drowned out by music and effects, but at times there are intentionally mumbled lines that may seem like a bad transfer but also is accurate to what Anderson intended. The Warner Blu-ray is up to its usual high standards, so points aren’t lost for Anderson’s audio trickery.
The Blu-ray is not what one would consider packed with special features. In fact, it contains all of four items, and three of them are various trailers for the movie with one extended/deleted scene that features a lot more Shasta Fay and a lot more narration. No making of, no behind-the-scenes footage, no cast and crew interviews, no outtakes, no commentary. It’s definitely not a package that film collectors would consider essential. (The DVD contains the same features as the Blu-ray.) Inherent Vice looks and sounds just fine on Blu-ray, but only the staunchest Paul Thomas Anderson fans (or Pynchon fans) will find this one worth the purchase price.
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