INHERENT VICE (Rated R)

A film often looks interesting if the trailer proves to be tantalizing with the promise of better things to come.

At first glance, that appeared to be the case with “Inherent Vice,” where the clips revealed the tease of something wacky with off-kilter humor.

Instead, the trailer may have pieced together the best parts of the film, allowing the viewer’s imagination to roam with possibilities of how Thomas Pynchon’s novel would be adapted by director Paul Thomas Anderson, whose eclectic resume includes “Boogie Nights” and “Punch-Drunk Love.”

The production notes explain the meaning of “inherent vice” to be that of a “hidden defect in a good or property which causes or contributes to its deterioration, damage or wastage. These defects of an inherent nature make the item an unacceptable risk to a carrier or insurer.”

OK, whatever this means in terms of explaining Anderson’s movie is unclear to me, except that the setting of Los Angeles circa 1970, with a cast of characters that includes surfers, dopers, hustlers, rockers, a sax player working undercover, LAPD detectives, and dentists, reveals a world full of humans with serious defects.

“Inherent Vice,” which might have been film noir if the setting had been about four decades earlier, is a story that dives headlong into the smoky haze and neon afterglow of the American counterculture expiring in a puff of psychedelic last hurrah at a grim time after the horrors of the Manson murders and Altamont rock concert.

Joaquin Phoenix, sporting shaggy hippie-style long hair and mutton-chop sideburns, is stoner private eye Doc Sportello, who resides in a ramshackle beachside house in fictional Gordita Beach and works out of what appears to be a medical office where consultations are facilitated by the easy availability of various hallucinogens.

A strange mystery story begins to unfold when Doc is hired by his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), a formerly free-spirited beach girl, to find her married billionaire boyfriend Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), a land developer of mediocre tract housing.

Meanwhile, Mickey’s wife is carrying on a dalliance with a fitness trainer, and apparently has little concern about her missing husband, who turns out to be discovered as the guest of a for-profit mental institution.

Shasta had feared that Mickey’s wife and lover conspired to have the real estate magnate committed.

To think that Doc has the simple task of locating Mickey Wolfmann would seem to be the essence of this mystery. But no, other factors intrude, such as the black doper visiting Doc with a request to locate Mickey’s bodyguard, a white supremacist who was a former cellmate.

Complicating matters is the request of Hope (Jena Malone) to find out what happened to her husband, surf-rock saxophonist Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), who shows up in a newsreel as a protestor at a Richard Nixon rally but may in fact be working as an undercover agent.

Then, there the case of Doc’s former client Crocker Fenway (Martin Donovan), whose runaway daughter Japonica (Sasha Pieterse) was once located by the gumshoe, who seems to be connected to the Golden Fang, which is either a Chinese drug cartel or a dental group that fixes the rotted teeth of druggies.

Speaking of dentists, Martin Short appears as the powder-loving Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd, a lunatic who is obsessed with young women and cocaine, hooked on free love, and yet somehow made it through dentistry school, and is now connected to the mysterious Golden Fang empire.

Shadowing the gumshoe’s moves through the hazy underworld is the frozen banana-chomping LAPD detective and self-described “renaissance cop” Detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), stuck in the gray flannel ‘50s world and a tough guy with a strange love-hate relationship with Doc.

As Doc pursues his investigations, he moves from his natural habit of beachside surf shacks across the greater Los Angeles landscape to LAPD’s Parker Center, hillside mansions, seedy massage parlors, dust-swept construction sites, coastal diners, rehab centers and the sleek offices of Golden Fang.

Doc’s brush with the law includes Deputy District Attorney Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon), with whom he has occasional carnal relations.

Doc’s attorney Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro) practices maritime law, which only comes in handy when the Golden Fang is also found to be a large sailboat.

If this review appears to be rambling, it only because “Inherent Vice” resembles a travelogue of the weird and strange, where very little makes sense, resulting in the feeling of confusion and hazy memory.

The film should be called “Incoherent Vice,” a moniker that has probably already been noted in other places.    

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.