Vice Is Hip

[Matthew Taylor]

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/vice-is-hip/

"Anderson’s alternately hammy and hard-boiled script is ripped from the
black-and-white downtown L.A. of the ’50s. But *Inherent Vice* is also a
movie in ’60s Malibu pastels. Set about a quarter of a century after
throwbacks like *L.A. Confidential*, *Vice* belongs to the time when Los
Angeles was turning into the place that plays itself. The most influential
police chief of the mid-1960s, William H. Parker, was also a consultant on
*Dragnet*, the most influential procedural drama in American television
history. *Valley of the Dolls*came out in 1967, a commercial hit and the
first cautionary tale of New Hollywood, and in 1969 the American New Wave
arrived with the near-simultaneous release of Jacques Demy’s*Model Shop* and
Dennis Hopper’s *Easy Rider*, both filmed in and informed by L.A. In *Vice*,
every character is performing a role, and not always in the same kind of
movie. We watch, as if flipping through the years, a stoner comedy, a
period caper, a neo-noir.

At first all the genre confusion has Phoenix seeming out of his depth. The
audience, too, is slow to react when Brolin goes from solid to silly,
sucking a chocolate-­covered banana like it’s a dick. Then the chimera
shuffles into its own loping rhythm, not committing to any one thing, and
it’s clear that Anderson sees the story from more angles than Pynchon did.
Less clear is the plot. Competing lifestyles—not story lines—inform the
chaos, and I doubt I’ll spoil the mood by saying that Coy finds his way out
of a neo-Nazi group and back to his no-longer-widow and child, as well as a
new American Express card."
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