Supposed to be free - Revisiting Inherent Vice

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The film may not give you answers, but it offers something better: the narcotic comfort of knowing that confusion might be the only honest response to the world as it is.

Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a private investigator with a permanent glaze of marijuana and melancholy, opens the door to a ghost—Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), barefoot, brown-skinned, backlit like a memory. She’s his former lover, and she arrives bearing a story soaked in paranoia: her current boyfriend, real estate tycoon Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), may be the target of a plot involving his wife, her sidepiece guru, and the baroque inner workings of Los Angeles capital.

What follows isn’t so much a mystery as a fever dream of capitalism in decline, the hippie ethos curdling into the bureaucratic apparatus of the carceral state. Anderson opens the film with Can’s “Vitamin C,” letting that elastic bassline sneak under Shasta’s goodbye, until the track’s ecstatic “Hey you!” crashes in alongside the title: INHERENT VICE—neon, lurid, prophetic.

Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel is dense—deliriously so. It resists casual consumption and mocks the very idea of narrative clarity. Its detractors, clinging to the life raft of plot, call it “incomprehensible.” That’s a failure of imagination. Inherent Vice is a palimpsest of half-erased intentions and false leads. The deeper you go, the more it feels like wandering through fog with only vibes for a compass.

Doc chases after breadcrumbs: a client, a lead, a name, a face—only to find that each new path loops back to a more sinister architecture. The Golden Fang, a surreal corporate entity encompassing dentistry, heroin, and shadow economies, emerges as the shape-shifting antagonist. Anderson doesn’t decode the novel so much as embody its ambient dread: the creeping suspicion that freedom was always a leased fantasy, revoked the moment it became inconvenient to those in power.

Los Angeles here is a paranoid hallucination—where ex-Communist actors star in anti-Communist thrillers, cops feud with Feds, and white power bikers work security for Jewish developers. Vice maps the ideological rot with a stoned clarity: all counterculture, we see, is fair game for co-option.

There’s little respite. Doc’s mental corkboard becomes a charcoal-smeared wall of half-spelled names and guesses. Watching him try to make sense of it is like jumping into Game of Thrones midseason—everyone’s dead, no one’s trustworthy, and the dragons are already gone.

Beneath the narrative sprawl lies a more sinister metamorphosis: the psychedelic era, once a site of consciousness expansion, has become industrialised, repackaged, and weaponised. The revolution has been tranquillised. Drugs, once a tool of escape or insight, are now the handcuffs.

Robert Elswit’s cinematography doesn’t just replicate the ’70s; it lives in it. With production designer David Crank and costume designer Mark Bridges, he gives the film the faded glow of a forgotten Polaroid: sun-bleached, weed-sweet, edged with menace.

Anderson resists the lure of acid-drenched dream logic, largely keeping one foot in a coherent reality—though that reality’s trustworthiness is another matter. Take Joanna Newsom’s Sortilège, the film’s narrator and perhaps Doc’s conscience—or fantasy. One moment, she’s in the passenger seat. The next, gone. No puff of smoke. No cue for suspicion. Anderson doesn’t wink. He just disappears her.

The ensemble is sprawling, but each face leaves a dent. Phoenix is miraculous—equal parts Chaplin and Chandler. His Doc stumbles, mumbles, and pratfalls, and yet connects dots in ways only a true believer in the randomness of the universe can. His paranoia is both a performance and a condition, flickering like static on an old television.

Josh Brolin, as the brute-force LAPD detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, is a walking contradiction—cops are supposed to be square, but Bigfoot is all curve. He eats with aggression, speaks like a beat poet possessed by a cop show extra, and demands order in a world that won’t comply. He’s hilarious and horrifying, a monument to wounded masculinity.

Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, Owen Wilson, Martin Short—they each materialise as if summoned by Doc’s subconscious, playing the parts of allies, red herrings, ghosts. Del Toro’s maritime lawyer Smilax is all velvet and avoidance. Wilson’s Coy is the hippie as fallen angel. Short’s dentist is a pervert in paisley. Each adds a colour to the psychedelic bruise.

And then there’s Shasta. Waterston moves through the film like a wound under gauze: glowing, sore, impossible to ignore. In flashbacks, she’s the warm breeze of an imagined utopia. In the present, she’s a figure of loss and corruption—noir’s eternal promise and threat. Her return is a slow decay, and she pulls Doc—and us—down with her.

“Inherent Vice,” as defined in maritime law, is a flaw so deep it guarantees destruction. That’s the American experiment in Anderson’s telling—doomed from the inside. The film may not give you answers, but it offers something better: the narcotic comfort of knowing that confusion might be the only honest response to the world as it is.

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