Since every one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films is probably worth watching, I’m just filling in one of the blanks. Unfortunately in this case, I’m not quite sure what to make of this one. It’s basically something of a drug trip film which I tend to dislike and it has an overly complicated plot which makes things even worse. But from what I understand, it does seem to be rather faithful adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel it was based on and it does feature the director’s usual high standard of craftsmanship.
Hippie private investigator Doc Sportello lives near the beach in Los Angeles in the 1970s and one night is visited by an old girlfriend Shasta. She tells him that she is now involved with a wealthy real estate mogul Mickey Wolfman but she suspects that Mickey’s wife and her lover are conspiring to steal his money and commit him into an asylum. He also gets other requests, to recover money from a member of the Aryan Brotherhood and to search for a missing husband, but it seems that all of the cases are connected. While following up a lead in a sleazy Asian massage parlor, he is knocked unconscious and wakes up next to the corpse of the very man he is supposed to collect money from. He is hauled in and interrogated by his nemesis, police detective Bigfoot Bjornsen who tells him that both Mickey and Shasta have gone missing. One clue leads to another and the case keeps sprawling ever wider with drug smugglers, the FBI, corrupt elements of the LAPD and much more all being involved.
To say that this is a confusing mess of a plot that is almost impossible to follow would be understating things. An endless of characters pop up to provide clues to Sportello for seemingly no reason and he just stumbles along from person to person in his relaxed, drug-induced haze. There are so many details that I’m not sure the viewer is even supposed to be able to follow the logic and some of them don’t even make much sense when you think about it. Why would Jade from the massage parlor want to help the Coy the police informant for example? I think the plot points and story beats matter less than the colorful characters, settings and gags that fill out the film. Almost every character here is a walking caricature, the square-jawed Bigfoot, Shasta as a cultist groupie, the FBI men-in-black with their own shadowy agenda and so on. There are ridiculous situations aplenty, such as the suspected drug-running organization the Golden Fang being based out of a building that literally looks like a golden fang and the front man being a dentist who likes drugs almost as much as Doc himself. For that matter, how about Doc having his office inside inside a clinic run by actual doctors, hence his nickname, but not being a doctor himself. This is a film that is all about the journey and not the destination and you’re supposed to relax and let it all sink in.
On the whole this feels like much lighter fare than the director’s usual body of work and doesn’t seem like it has much of an emotional center at all. As a result, I find little to like it and I’m just not a fan of the drug trip experience genre. At the same time, I can kind of appreciate why Anderson would want to make this. It takes themes and a basic plot that is recognizable from classic Los Angeles-based noirs like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, complete with real estate shenanigans and police corruption, and updates them with the hippie, beach surfing California culture as if to say that this too is America. Sportello is no Philip Marlowe but why not update the old archetype of the private investigator with this mellow, weed-smoking man in shorts and sandals. Similarly Shasta isn’t the fashionably elegant femme fatale we’re more familiar with but she is one and it’s good to expand the repertoire of stock characters.
All the same, I can’t say that I enjoyed this one and I didn’t even find the numerous gags to be that entertaining. Even on the technical side, the visuals in this one looks less immediately exquisite than Anderson’s other work. I can’t recommend this one but I suppose that fans of the novel might like it.