Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon. The two names in a single sentence provoke a gasp and a spike in the pulse rate. The movie that's resulted from Anderson's big-screen adaptation of Pynchon's noirish novel is far more likely to confound than to excite, but it's also going to blow minds and tickle funny bones.

The film, based on Pynchon's novel of the same title from 2009, will inevitably draw comparisons to the 1998 Coen Brothers movie "The Big Lebowski." Consider the parallels: The paradox of a sunny, Los Angeles-based noir; the setting in a specific point in the past (1990 for "Lebowski," 1970 for "Vice"); the stoner protagonist who finds himself caught up in cross-currents involving a wealthy family and criminal enterprises; a missing woman whose presumed fate is dire and whose absence lies heavy upon the developing narrative; the outrageously idiosyncratic minor characters who drift in and out of the story; the hair-raising twists and turns of a convoluted plot.

But there are also significant differences that set the two projects well apart. Unlike Jeff Bridges' Kahl�a-swilling "Dude," the stoner here really is a private eye, albeit a perpetually baked one; his name is "Doc" Sportello, and he's played with magnificent sloth by Joaquin Phoenix. Doc is tipped off early in the film about a scheme in which the family and associates of a rich businessman draw plans to commit the businessman to a mental institution to prevent him from giving his fortune away. The tip comes from Doc's ex-girlfriend, a willowy beauty named Shasta (Katherine Waterston). The businessman in question is Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), and Shasta is his girl on the side.

Sportello has barely begun to investigate (his first point of inquiry is a brothel that offers its services on a menu that includes the "Pussy Eater's Special") when he's knocked on the head, framed for a murder, and more or less tossed into the clutches of his old nemesis ("frenemy" might be a better word), a police detective named "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (a smashing Josh Brolin). Bigfoot has a major oral fixation going on, to the point that his Krazy Kat / Ignatz Mouse attachment to Sportello has a palpable homoerotic undertone -- no mean feat, given Sportello pretty much could pass as a twin of Hyde, the sunglasses-and-muttonchop wreathed hippie played by Danny Masterson on "That 70s Show."

Bigfoot cuts Sportello loose, partly thanks to pressure from Sportello's lawyer (a droll Benicio del Toro) but also, one suspects, because Bigfoot is more deeply involved in whatever's really going on that anyone suspects. Soon enough, it's clear that there's plenty more happening just under the surface: A supposedly dead man named Coy (Owen Wilson) fetches up very much alive, a coke-head dentist (Martin Short) passes through the film like a blazing comet, and a sinister ship / gang / corporation called The Golden Fang seems to hover with deadly intent everyplace Sportello looks.

Explaining the movie is hopeless, because the plot, intricate as it might be, is beside the point. The film's textures and performances are much more the reason to see it, much as one reads Pynchon less for his stories than for his characterizations, digressions, soberly presented fantastical elements, and uninhibited glee in diving nose-first into all sorts of dire human muck. The film progresses in the way of a flower; one feels by the end that an array of petals has just opened up and then closed once more, and there's a sense of almost mystic symmetry and deliberation underneath all the furiously spinning antics.

Will stoners like the movie? Will Pynchon fans be outraged? Will Paul Thomas Anderson aficionados applaud, or walk away in a daze? Again, all that is irrelevant: Simply fall into this film and let it carry you into its strange and sometimes hallucinatory realms. You'll think deep thoughts; you won't remember them later, but you'll know that, for a moment, they were yours.