Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice (2014) is a stoner noir comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Paul Thomas Anderson adapted Thomas Pynchon's novel, and Joaquin Phoenix leads as a private eye who keeps losing the thread.

Los Angeles, around 1970. Larry "Doc" Sportello runs his detective business out of a beach pad, half-buried in pot smoke. His ex, Shasta, turns up with a warning: her new boyfriend, a wealthy real-estate developer, is about to vanish, and there's a plot to lock him away. Then she vanishes too. Doc follows the smoke into a tangle of a crooked cop named Bigfoot (Josh Brolin), a missing saxophone player, a shady dental syndicate and boats running cargo offshore. Pull one thread and the whole thing unravels.

The case is almost beside the point. Anderson catches a hangover moment in American history, where the sixties curdle into something colder and more corporate. The cast runs deep: Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, Katherine Waterston, Martin Short. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for its adapted screenplay. The story is designed to confuse, and that's the fun of it. Stream Inherent Vice (2014) online on iFILM.