During 1970, detective Larry began embodying a new career path as he confronts Chasta Faye Hempworth, his ex-girlfriend and planner, Mickey Wolfman, her billionaire boyfriend and wife. Shasta believed that Wolfman would be a real target for kidnapping by his wife and lover at those moments. Doc begins searching for Wolfmann, and for others who have gone missing, including Shasta, and someone who appears to have been killed.
Anderson moves further from conventional storytelling with each new film, and closer to something more intuitive, more damning, more true. He hasn't made it there yet. God help us when he does.
Inherent Vice is a sun-glared, neon-limned muddle of noir plotline and potheaded jokery that not only doesn't make sense, but actually seems to try hard not to.
Inherent Vice is a bizarre, almost dreamlike, movie, one that makes sense from moment to moment but falls apart the second you try to tie it all together.
Joaquin Phoenix is perfectly cast as the perpetually befuddled Doc, a private detective of sorts who immerses himself in pot in the Los Angeles of 1970.
Although it's not as hermetic and impenetrable as The Master, Inherent Vice still comes off as a giant inside joke to anyone who hasn't read Pynchon's novel.
Once you let the chaos of all the eccentric characters and the mystery Doc is trying to solve, wash over you, you start appreciating it, but if you question it and try to corral it, the film just slips away from you.
... I was drawn into this crazy world completely by Anderson and his merry pranksters, a shaggy dog mystery with a stoner Philip Marlowe applying of free-association investigative technique...
If the adaptation's a little too faithful to sustain a cinematically tight story, there's still a lot to admire in the sheer, uninhibited folly of the whole thing, the gall to get groovy while the Oscar-watchers are on high alert.