We love when they do this.
We love when Netflix make a massive deal of new shows like Stranger Things, Narcos or Rick and Morty and then quietly, without any fanfare, add a modern classic or two into their movies section as a nice little surprise for whenever you’re stuck for something to watch.
Well, they’ve done it again.
Browsing through the menu yesterday we came across Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s woozy tale of a perma-stoned private investigator in 1970s Los Angeles.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, mutton-chopped, confused yet singular in his determination to locate his former lover and her current beau – a real estate magnate by the name of Mickey Wolfmann – whose mysterious disappearance drives the film through a number of increasingly absurd situations and characters.
Phoenix, so stifled by that rare Anderson misfire in The Master, is far looser and clearly having lots of fun here, his Doc a brilliant amalgam of The Dude, Jake Gittes and Matthew McConaughey’s Ron Woodruff.
A lot of Inherent Vice recalls the best work of The Coen Brothers – particularly the similarly underrated Hail, Caesar! – but this has a far mellower feel to it and is scored brilliantly by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.
It will lose a lot of people who favour a simpler narrative and it does ask a lot of its audience. The best advice is to just let it wash over you and figure out the intricacies later, because it’s a funny, bamboozling and ultimately rewarding scorcher of a movie.
Adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s stoner detective story, The Guardian was one of a select number of outlets to give it the full five stars. Peter Bradshaw said of it, “The movie is a delirious triumph: a stylish-squared meeting of creative minds, a swirl of hypnosis and symbiosis, with Pynchon’s prose partly assigned to a narrating character and partly diversified into funky dialogue exchanges. Each enigmatic narrative development is a twist of the psychedelic kaleidoscope.”
