government. And speaking of the feds, they’ve infiltrated all the movements, feeding off the crashed and hopeless dopers in order to turn them into special agents. Williams), tellingly notes, Tariq’s black-power prison group and the Aryan Nation essentially share similar views on the U.S. Like an early client of Doc’s, Tariq Khalil (Michael K. It’s the end of the tumultuous 1960s - 1970 Los Angeles, to be exact - and by now, the hippie movement has been co-opted by industry, and all the supposed subversion behind their calls for peace and love was merely a hiding ground for more violent, hateful types. Among other things Doc discovers there’s a whole lot of Chinese heroin involved and a cult of dentists linked to that. It’s a lot to take in, but in the end the plot details matter less than the underlying social vision it outlines. Naturally, it turns out that the case is bigger than it at first seems, and that everything is connected…maybe. So Doc’s on the case, stumbling in his own pot-induced stupor onto new leads at every turn. Said developer, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), then disappears, and Shasta - who had been carrying on an affair with him when she met up with Doc -disappears along with him. She’s caught up in something involving a Jewish real-estate developer, his wife, her lover and a whole bunch of neo-Nazis - friends of the family. This time, however, Anderson’s ruined subject isn’t simply a man, but a crumbling generational utopia. The hazy intrigue begins when an old flame, Shasta Fey Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), suddenly shows up in Larry “Doc” Sportello’s (Joaquin Phoenix) home, asking for help. Inherent Vice seems like breezy, insignificant fare on the surface, but the film’s red-eyed ramble achieves the same thematic ends as his more carefully structured dramas. But “minor” ultimately means little with these artistic giants in their respective fields. Many consider Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice to be a minor work the New York Times’ review dubbed it “Pynchon Lite.” Choosing a seriocomic yarn about a perpetually weed-affected private dick as the source material for his seventh feature might have seemed like similarly trivial territory for Paul Thomas Anderson after There Will Be Blood and The Master, two grim films about corrupt, powerful men.
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