Inherent Vice thinks Rockford Files and Police Squad are cool. Good

You’d have to be a pretty hard case not to like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. The writer-director, adapting Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 shaggy-detective novel with rare alertness to detail, has packed his follow-up to the highly noncomical There Will Be Blood and The Master with visual gags and druggy slapstick that echo the author’s wordplay. Before anything else, his Vice is a very funny movie.

What kind of case you need to be in order to love Inherent Vice — and, having seen it twice so far and developed a heavy appetite for a third viewing, I do love Anderson’s Vice — I’m not sure. Metaphor-hungry, for one thing. Because, superficially entertaining as it is, the thing is no less about greed, corruption and moral disappointment than Blood and The Master, though it’s considerably more forgiving of its principals — who, stuck in 1970 as they are, could use a little forbearance. You can read Vice as a hippie elegy for the decade just gone by, but more than that it’s a shudder ahead of Watergate and the political, social and cultural bottoming out that has already begun (give or take the Me Decade’s peerless cinema, to which Anderson has again addressed a valentine). The Vice characters who managed to stay straight through the Woodstock era are about to enter Nixon’s 1970s no less exhausted — and no less left behind, really — than the longhairs they curse. Cinematographer Robert Elswit spotlights this teeter between decades and constituencies by keeping much of the action in bleach-strength, nowhere-to-hide daylight. There’s neon-slickened night, too, but at all times the moment, like many of the figures whom Pynchon and Anderson have drawn into it, is dark.

Blinking into the sun is private eye Larry “Doc” Sportello (a lycanthropic Joaquin Phoenix, topping out a four-performances-deep winning streak), a lovesick stoner already stuck in the past like a turntable needle forgotten in a record’s playout groove. The song still on his mind is Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston — cool, feline and appropriately shallow), who has given up being barefoot and high with Doc to become a mogul’s sex toy. When the mogul disappears, Shasta calls on Doc, setting off a series of shambling, deeply weird encounters with assorted lowlifes and lifestyle prisoners. Doc’s trustworthiness, we understand from Shasta, is ironclad in the mold of the original SoCal shamus, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. His methods, less so. Doc’s bloodhound is something closer to Lester Bangs at the Fillmore West than to Humphrey Bogart at Victor’s — or, thankfully, to Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s version of The Long Goodbye, an obvious touchstone.

Too obvious, in fact. Vice more readily recalls The Rockford Files, the lightfooted James Garner P.I. show that was on the air when Altman’s 1973 film hit. Garner once played Marlowe and understood the character’s nobility, central to the whole genre. Rockford tweaks that nobility; Altman leaves it in the surf to rot at low tide. Gould’s reaction to the story’s troubles is a repeated “That’s all right with me,” which isn’t at all the same as the novel’s hero shrugging off money or sex if the motives behind them stink (as they usually do). Very little is OK with Chandler’s Marlowe — or with Pynchon’s Doc, who understands the culture that feeds him dope and pussy only a little better than does his cop frenemy, Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin — furious, sad, perfect).

Anderson finds a better hallmark in Police Squad, the gag-saturated, six-episode TV flop by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. They had come off a hugely successful movie, Airplane, and would make the ABC series another winner eventually, as The Naked Gun (and its sequels). But nothing else they did is as joke-for-joke thrilling as Police Squad, and Anderson has cited the show as an inspiration for Vice. (Anderson’s Zuckerisms include things like, on a typed police report that flashes onscreen, a crime committed on a street named for Gummo Marx.) With Airplane, the Abrahams–Zucker axis parodied the star-studded disaster epics of the 1960s and ’70s, stolid productions that spoke to a Communist-spooked interventionist xenophobia while pantomiming the death rattle of Hollywood’s studio system. Squad adjusted the formula to savage the distillation of detective fiction’s moral code and metaphor-infused storytelling to the glib beats of gumshoe television (complete with big-name guest stars). Anderson, besides dialing up the laughs as never before, achieves his own kind of parody by filling Vice with smartly stunt-cast actors actually acting — best among them Owen Wilson, defying his usual spaciness to be great again; Martin Short, looking goofy in Willy Wonka crushed velvet but flashing desperate eyes; and Martin Donovan, vibrating with entitled malevolence.

And dude, the music. I got the soundtrack CD for Christmas, and I have listened to almost nothing else since then — including right now. The movie announces itself with Can’s “Vitamin C” and signs off with Chuck Jackson’s version of “Any Day Now,” which is more resigned than the more familiar Elvis comeback-year take. A great Minnie Riperton song kicks in during a scene with Riperton’s daughter, Maya Rudolph (Anderson’s wife). And Jonny Greenwood’s heartbroken, paranoid score tells you everything you need to know about this hallucinatory, melancholy movie’s subtext (and its enigmatic final scene): It’s basically a Miklós Rózsa score for some lost black-and-white movie. One about some lost sleuth, about to finally get around to solving himself.