Inventing the Abbotts

Inventing the Abbotts (1997) is a romantic drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Pat O'Connor and set in a small Illinois town in the 1950s. Joaquin Phoenix, Billy Crudup, Liv Tyler and Jennifer Connelly play out a story of class, desire and secrets across two families who live on opposite sides of the same street.

The Abbott girls are the town's most admired family. The Holt brothers can't stop circling them. Jacey Holt — the good-looking one — moves through the Abbott sisters methodically, each conquest a way of getting even with their father for some old grievance he won't explain. His younger brother Doug (Joaquin Phoenix) has a different problem: he's actually in love with Pamela Abbott (Liv Tyler), the quietest one, and that turns out to matter.

The film is told as memory, narrated by an older Doug looking back. That voice gives it an elegiac quality that separates it from a standard 1950s romance. Adapted from short stories by Sue Miller, with cinematography by Kenneth MacMillan that gives each shot the texture of a photograph found in a drawer. Stream Inventing the Abbotts (1997) online on iFILM.