Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice (2014) follows a permanently stoned private detective in Los Angeles in 1970, and the plot is close to impossible to follow. Doc Sportello's ex girlfriend turns up at his door one night: her new partner, a wealthy property developer, is about to be committed to an asylum by his wife and the wife's lover. Doc starts looking into it. Then the developer disappears, one of his bodyguards is found dead, and Doc is a suspect. A cartel of dentists, a saxophonist informant, a neo Nazi gang, federal agents and a ship called the Golden Fang pass through. The film does not try to untangle it. Even when Doc grasps something he forgets it by the next scene, and the audience is left in the same state. The confusion is not a fault but the method. The real subject is the end of a period. The communal feeling of the sixties has dispersed, people have sold each other out, and property, police and money have taken its place. Doc is the only one mourning it. It is adapted from Thomas Pynchon's novel, the first of his books to reach the screen, and he had been considered unadaptable. Joaquin Phoenix stars; Josh Brolin plays the policeman. A woman narrates, taken from a character in the book. Jonny Greenwood wrote the score. It runs 148 minutes. Good for: PTA, seventies texture, and noir parody. Less good for: the plot is deliberately untrackable and the pace is very loose.