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No Movie Captures the Essence of Neil Young’s Best Songs Like Inherent Vice
Just as Neil sings of an elusive past, Inherent Vice dangles a rush of emotions in front of you only to slip away the second you try to grasp them.
While borne, in part, out of the Canadian singer’s personal crises, the album maps neatly onto the period of American history it emerged into, arriving amid the lingering cultural hangover from the ’60s and less than a month before a certain paranoid, hippie-hating president resigned the office in disgrace. While watching TV with his district-attorney lover, Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon), Doc spirals into a fit of stoned paranoia after seeing his supposedly dead hippie acquaintance Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson) get arrested on a news broadcast while protesting a Nixon speech. And here’s where Inherent Vice ’s relationship to Young’s music becomes a bit harder to define: More than any other film I’ve seen, it channels the slippery, seductive pull of the singer’s acoustic ballads, drawing you back to it time and again in hopeless attempts to pin down whatever inscrutable tangle of emotions it drags out.
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