Inherent Vice is a confounding film. Or is puzzling the word? I’m trying to find the correct word for the feeling I had walking out of P.T. Anderson’s latest picture but I’m having some trouble. Discomfiting?

The film adapts Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the same name, about a drugged out hippie private detective named Doc Sportello and the many, many, many, many individuals he interacts with as he takes on a bunch of seemingly related cases that have something to do with a real estate developer named Wolfman and an undercover Owen Wilson looking to get home. There is a plot in there, a sprawling one. But regarding plot: who cares. Inherent Vice is more confusing than anything Anderson has done.

Suffice it to say the film is about hippies and cops and drugs and dentists, love lost and romance and hallucinations, and the city of Los Angeles. It all coalesces around the stoned Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc Sportello. Doc is the guide for the viewer, the burned-out Virgil to our very lost Dante, traveling through a 1970s Los Angeles that itself is changing and unrecognizable (Doc has his own Virgil, played by Joanna Newsome, who keeps Doc oriented through reality and hallucination; this is assistance the audience would likely benefit from as well).

Confusing plot is one part of the immense yet intricate Inherent Vice. One that, to be honest, comes as only the aftertaste to the cinematic experience that Anderson has put together. On a single viewing you probably won’t make too much sense of the story, (for more on this, read Forest Lewis) but it doesn’t take long to realize that fact, and move on.

Plot has never been the central concern for Paul Thomas Anderson anyway. His films, at their heart, are about characters. And it is in character that Anderson’s work seems to be trending toward the confounding. Thinking back through his work, he’s never made a film more interested in what happens than who it happens to, and in that sense Anderson’s work is getting more confounding.

I am surprised, shocked really, by how similar a reaction Inherent Vice created to Anderson’s previous film, The Master. The experience of watching both requires audience to let go of certain expectations that we have in the movies: that character/story/plot will carry us from one place to another, and that along the way we have will have certain marks to guide our emotional or intellectual engagement. I lost count of how many scenes in Inherent Vice are there of their own accord, adding something to Doc if we’re lucky, but just as often being forgotten by Doc and the audience.

Neither film obliges our expectations. Instead, they leave audiences walking out of the theater with brows furrowed, wondering about what just happened, and in my case, why I didn’t experience something-anything-in the end.

But therein lies the great success of P.T. Anderson’s latest work. When credits rolled on The Master, I was convinced that the film had failed. That whatever Anderson had set forth to accomplish with this strange portrait of a scamming huckster and his sort-of student had missed its mark and would have no lasting effect. How wrong I was. The Master seeped into the brain in such an effective, eerie manner that to say the film fails is laughable. I may not like it much, but it did do something.

And so it is with Inherent Vice. An ensemble comedy with bizarre performances and a plot that is almost impossible to follow. And yet. The movie works its way into your skull. By the time Officer Bigfoot Bjornson is eating an entire tray of marijuana like a cartoon character in a freak-out comedy, Inherent Vice has already taken root somewhere deep inside the brain, laying root the mind-altering drugs that are only delaying the effects we can safely say will come.

What the effects of that high will be? That remains to be seen.

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