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This odd, offbeat film is a true cultural artifact of its time -- the turbulent, disorienting, angst drenched brief period of transition from the exuberant, flowery, naive 60s to the cold, crass, furiously superficial 70s. Tough times, emotionally and psychologically, for anyone who was paying any kind of attention to the rapid evaporation of that quaint, doomed-from-its-birth concept popularly advertised as "The American Dream." In other words, this weird movie is an artified expression of that outrageously surreal absurdity that we know and fear as Reality. Heavy, man.

Sure, Dustin Hoffman is thoroughly captivating, radiating his signature brand of endearingly charming neurosis as Georgie Solloway, a Dylanesque Folk/Pop Singer/Songwriter Star; a sort of hippiefied, odder, more troubled Woody Allen vibe. New York City just seemed to be rife with these kind of semi-tragic self absorbed antihero types whose only superpower is blunt unfiltered honesty. Trainfulls of 'em zigzagging across town and zipping up and down the island, like motorized armadas of nervous nutty nebbishy nobodys. Except Georgie is a Somebody.

And then he meets his perfect match in the delightfully distracted, lovely lady Allison played brilliantly by Barbara Harris. Allison's a singer/actress, of course, who hasn't had a linear (boring) thought in probably 1,000 years. She's a force of nature in a miniskirt, if nature lives in a 5 story walkup on the Lower West Side. Georgie and Allison chat aimiably about death and tedious trivialities, as well as about the weight of their own individual private universes. It's often fascinating conversation and almost just as often mind numbing, in a strangely delicate, sweet way.

He trusts his psychoanalyst/therapist of 7+ years, played by the always solid and impressive Jack Warden, who happens to be an accent hopping Sigmund Freud wannabe, at least in the clouded, warped eyes and mind of poor struggling Georgie. It's a fun conceit, and Georgie even hallucinates his doctor suddenly breaking out in a musical number that has him pleasantly exclaiming just how sick he is of listening to Georgie's neverending tales of woe. It's very funny.

Georgie's frequent suicide fantasies are sprung on us with little or no warning, the cummulative effect of which leaves us nearly indifferent to the prospect that he may actually go through with it soon enough. It's a genuinely peculiar emotional limbo that we're placed in by all the wild, wacky, frantic shennanigans, one that doesn't fully reveal its profound psychological impact till well after the end credits have run. Perhaps days later.

In fact, the ending is so confidently content to leave us unsure of just what the holy heck we've been gawking at for the past 108 minutes, it all ultimately actually seems to somehow make sense. Somehow. Sort of... Don't think about it too much, it'll only drive ya nuts.

There's an old cliché often repeated when people are discussing the late 60s and early 70s which declares that if you can remember it then you weren't really there, "there" being a figurative term for the mental space occupied by the drugged, stoned, tuned in dropped out generation of free loving, free thinking hippies, protesters, radicals, and assorted social misfits who were aggressively or passively challenging traditional norms of thought and behavior. If you were sober enough to retain clear, coherent, intelligible recollections of events, well, you obviously didn't participate enough to qualify as a valid spokesperson for the counterculture. Talk about a paradox.

And this is the guiding principle by which this film negotiates a much hyped and mythologized time in American history, when concepts such as reality and truth were being tested in new and novel and often fashionable ways. The hippest, grooviest, most out their mind thinkers were grasping at the most ephemeral, fleeting wisps of rationality in their attempts to contrive a more genuine, real ethos than the shallow materialistic one espoused by their disingenuous, hypocritical parents. Younger people were very aggressively and creatively testing the bounds and the integrity of mainstream society, much to the dismay and terror of older folks. It was a very intense, weird, wild time psychologically, and the profound disruptions to the social consciousness were being reflected in challenging and disturbing new forms of art.

Performance Art today is understood to mean any human behavior which might attract other people's attention and perhaps confuses or threatens them but is actually just a theatrical stunt; like Jack Ass but without the actual violent kicks to the groin. But in the 60s performance art more often meant creative acts which included the audience or which benignly challenged them to engage with the action of the performance. It was an exciting, fun, sometimes scary method for artists to directly connect with an audience, often in unexpected ways such as improvised dancing and singing, or more dramatically with moments of seemingly real drama, such as an actor planted in the audience disrupting the proceedings with unusual or inappropriate behavior. The action was being brought directly to the audience intimately and personally. All barriers between the artists and the audience were being torn down in a symbolic pantomime of the radical changes of which they were dreaming for the larger society.

Likewise, cinema in the 60s into the 70s experienced a phase of unprecedented freedom, experimentation and variety, and the general public were surprisingly receptive to so many of the odd, offbeat, confrontational films. Think about Easy Rider where the protagonists exist on the margins of normal mainstream society and whose hedonistic, self indulgent but benign behavior is extremely threatening to the straight society. The two modern day cowboys weren't living for anyone else but themselves, but their unconventional identities marked them as soldiers on the front lines of the generational war.

In the archly mythical Western films of the 40s and 50s the brave, valiant heroes always prevailed, but in the new age of insidious conformity they are shotgunned to death in a sudden act of utter depravity. The immaculate, pure America so passionately championed in the pages of countless history and story books was now seen to be the home of so much grotesquely repulsive ignorance. The USA was less a melting pot of disparate cultures peaceably coexisting and more so a scorching cauldron of seething bigotry, racism, misogyny and paranoia.

All this is reflected—obliquely and stylistically—in Inherent Vice, and especially in Joaquin Phoenix's layered and nuanced performance. His undeniably fascinating and sometimes frustrating portrayal of a man unwittingly caught in the fierce pincers of colliding social forces very effectively conveys the intense sense of doubt and uncertainty which pulsed just beneath the surface of everyday life. If the nightly news broadcast wasn't terrifying you in near real time with graphic images of the horrific carnage in Viet Nam half a world away then perhaps the recurring spectacle of cities in flames as disenfranchised, oppressed, enraged citizens rioted, maybe in your own town, just down the street; perhaps that kept you second guessing everything you ever learned and everything your leaders were telling you? The revolution was occurring on all fronts, externally and internally.

These are the psychic forces which are acting upon director P. T. Anderson as he labors to elicit from his audience a response possibly similar to that experienced by someone under the influence of an illicit substance, as though his cinematic creation—his oddly compelling visuals and offbeat, syncopated narrative—are themselves hallucinogenic, narcotic agents. He wants to lull us into a sympathetic state of deep, profound uncertainty where we then might hopefully, possibly experience something not unlike a mind blowing revelation about the true nature of reality. That's the grand, nearly impossible mission of this film, and in an often impressive and entertaining way it succeeds. There are so many moments in this wonderful film which exist as entirely abstract, ineffable questions brushing up against the dark mysteries lying at the weird, wild heart of our ever bewildering reality. Inherent Vice is a real head trip, man.

Only because I think Jack Lemmon was one of the finest comedic actors to ever appear in films or on stage does this otherwise angry, depressing movie manage to be a little bit entertaining. The grim and hostile tone of the film pushes it out of the realm of farce into the much less comical arena of social realism. The ever tightening circle of doom into which the hapless couple are ensnared is relieved only partially by Jack's masterful performance. His unequaled expertise in portraying an otherwise capable man under extreme duress keeps this bleak, heavy production lurching along.

I watched this one immediately after enjoying The Odd Couple on TCM and the drop off in quality is quite precipitous, though to be fair few films measure up to the transcendent heights which that earlier masterpiece attains. Maybe it's also unfair to be comparing this dour film to that hysterical gem, this one apparently is not an actual comedy, no, not at all. It's more a cinematic examination of the deepening psychosis afflicting contemporary society; a clinical dissection of the unraveling American dream. But oddly, it seems intent on trying to convince me that it's really a preposterous, wacky comedy.

The secret of comedy is timing, but unfortunately this misguided flick is written, directed and edited with a very poor sense of rhythm, comedic or otherwise. It's clunky and spastic. The beats which set up its gags and jokes are emphatically overstated and melodramatic, as though the real joke is on me for expecting a bigger, funnier punchline. And Sandy Dennis' character is so relentlessly shrill and tedious. But Jack is worth watching.