Our series on the best stoner movies ever made (that you can stream right now) flashes back to the psychedelic 70s
What’s funny about Inherent Vice (besides, you know, everything), is that it’s actually less of a “stoner film” than the book it’s based on. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice, published in 2009, goes even further with the High Times vibe than the movie—unrolling a faux-Black Lizard style detective story where stoner-sleuth Doc Sportello (played in the film by Joaquin Phoenix) searches for his ex-old lady Shasta Fay Hepworth (played in the film by Katherine Waterston) but then gets derailed at every turn by vibrant, Cheech and Chong-worthy hijinks like a guy named Denis (pronounced like penis) running around with a pizza on his head.
And while Inherent Vice the movie is quite faithful to the source, it’s more in terms of narrative and dialogue than in terms of comic tone. Denis still runs around, but sans the pizza.
As written for the screen and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice the movie ironically downplays much of the original novel’s ostensibly movie-friendly physical comedy in favor of MAD Magazine-worthy design elements and weirdly deadpan framing gags instead. So the humor of Anderson’s Inherent Vice creeps up with a zonked dryness—one that the director would seize upon and wring out even further in his next feature, Phantom Thread (2017), a comedy so dry that it’s desiccated (and another great film).
Of course both versions of Inherent Vice—being a tale about a joint-ripping detective unraveling a mystery that in one way or another revolves around the end of the American counterculture—clear the stoner-culture qualification test. But the laughs in Anderson’s movie version, somehow both upfront and offkey, come from somewhere much less broad than your average stoner comedy. Actually if Anderson’s Inherent Vice recalls anything from Cheech and Chong, it’s not a gag, but instead Tommy Chong’s understated visual-comedy direction on Next Movie (covered in a prior installment of Streaming for Stoners).
Actually, I’d say the best jokes from Anderson’s Inherent Vice sorta play out like how the best jokes in Tommy’s Cheech and Chong 2: Stuff like hard cuts to outré costumes and befuddled faces, or the mess of a home in the background of a shot, or a dirty foot or joint lingering goofily in the foreground, or the doped-out stumble of an extra as they pass through a frame. Like Eyes Wide Shut (1999) did for the erotic thriller, Inherent Vice seems to put a capstone on the stoner film subgenre—while also elevating it, with the greatest of sincerity, to high art.
Inherent Vice is streaming on Max and Hulu, and is up for rent on most VOD services.
