Get lost with director Paul Thomas Anderson and a shaggy Joaquin Phoenix in Thomas Pynchon’s detective novel, in 1970, in a marijuana haze, in the most convoluted plot since the Warren Commission report. It took about forty-five minutes into this two-and-a-half-hour extravaganza for the story to race past me. I didn’t know what was what, who was who, what was up and and what was down. Pivotal scenes breezed by and I didn’t know why they were so important. Most of the characters here do lots and lots of drugs, but it felt I like I was the one who was high.
If you ask me, Anderson aims to confuse. He doesn’t care if we follow the story. He’s constantly trying to trip us. The Los Angeles beach community here is full of shady characters and the film dumps ALL of them on us. They include corrupt fat cats, massage parlor goodtime girls, coke fiend doctors, loan sharks, police informants, hippie-hating cops, black militants and swastika-sporting ex-cons. Some characters stick around for awhile while others disappear after one scene. Meanwhile, the cases that pothead private eye Phoenix takes on have a way of intersecting, bumping into and spilling all over each other, making a big ol’ mess.
It’s not a great movie, but worth seeing. While Anderson lets the story fall apart, he maintains a great eye for screen detail and off-kilter scene-setting that keeps you watching. Anderson’s 1970 doesn’t look like a slick movie recreation. It brings convincing grime, down to the tastefully grainy look—Anderson’s a celluloid hold-out in a digital world—that makes even a modern DCP screening look a little like a film print. Also, as far as I know it’s the only time that a filmmaker has mixed the busily plotted detective movie with the low-brow stoner comedy (Anderson claims Cheech and Chong movies as one of many influences here). It embraces slapstick almost much as it does plot twists and its humor is stupid and tasteless and proud of it. Perplexing, funny, confusingly told, but beautifully made, this is The Big Sleep of the 2010s, only bigger and sleepier.