Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” embraces the romance of being disconnected, of finding out who you are by pretending who you think you should be, and getting in trouble. It’s a film that tries to capture the sun-drenched, locomotive feeling of falling in love.
It’s the 1970s; it’s the ‘Valley’, it’s L.A – Alana (Alana Haim) doesn’t know what the hell she wants to do with her life. Living at home with her two sisters (Danielle and Este Haim) and parents (Moti and Donna Haim), working to make ends meet for a high school photography company, Alana meets Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman).
Gary is a quirky, overly confident (and loveable) child actor and hustler. What starts as chaperoning evolves into L.A. topography charting shenanigans – selling water beds (amongst other things) – and finding out who they are and answering if that means they’re together.
“Licorice Pizza” is a strange beast to behold framed in the context of the director’s recent output. Whether it’s “There Will Be Blood”, “The Master”, “Inherent Vice”, or “Phantom Thread” – these adaptations or orchestrations develop a kind of aura – a long percolating, incisive and impactful feast of cinematic art from truly one of the best doing it.
So if PTA is going back to the 70s and L.A. after “Boogie Nights” and “Increment Vice”, he must have something to ‘say’. And that’s just it, “Licorice Pizza” isn’t about what it’s saying; it’s about the evocation of magic, a feeling of being unplugged, the hope of uncertainty.
Anderson has called this both an original work and an adaption of the “unpublished life” of Gary Goetzman (whom the screen Gary is inspired by). Paired with this lingering thrill of working with the band HAIM for some of their low budget, innovative and spontaneous music videos, he has found a spicy blend of different ingredients, family entanglements, and tall tales.
The result is a series of sprawling vignettes, both together and apart, where Gary and Alana move from job to job, hustle to hustle. Visually there’s the framing immediacy, impressionism, and unpredictability that so enlivened “Punch Drunk Love”. Apart from Johnny Greenwood originals, the score is also a tracklist of needle drops that recall movies as much as time with artists like Bing Crosby, Sonny & Cher, Nina Simone, The Doors, David Bowie and Donovan.
Hoffman, son of the devastatingly departed Phillip Seymour Hoffman, has a genuine creation in Gary – a strange and wonderful curiosity that captures Alana’s attention. Observant, intuitive – Gary is a Rolodex of salesman traits in a shameless cheap suit. It’s all the armour of a sweet boy beneath.
Haim is outstanding as Alana. It would surprise no one that this critic knows nothing about her band other than encountering their music to watch new directorial work from PTA. However, Alana’s performance as this alternate universe version of herself is divine.
Haim is constantly looking for paths either through jobs or men. Alana feels like the reliable observer in “Licorice Pizza”. In some ways, she is an auto-critique of the series of hustlers, hucksters and grand holders of court that populate so many of the director’s masterworks.
Gary, but more specifically Alana, encounters an eccentric line-up of showmen that form Herculean tasks for navigation and conquests. There’s Benny Safdie as Joel Wachs, a ‘too good to be true’ politician on the fast track. He has a suitably evasive quality so that, even while he’s able to inspire admiration and openness, you can’t help but feel that you’re being played.
Sean Penn is Jack Holden – a tragi-comic riff of William Holden. Wooing starlets with tales of action movie yesteryear and stoked by Tom Waits’ endangered, Old Hollywood director Rex Blau – Holden isn’t above drunken stunts to woo fellow steak house punters.
Finally, there’s Bradley Cooper’s outrageous extended pop-in as renowned nutbag Jon Peters. Armed with the threat of his relationship to Barbara Streisand (don’t you mess up that pronunciation), Cooper’s Peters is goaded into the most intense and extra impression of the larger than life figure. More ‘over the top’ Bradley Cooper, between serious directing gigs, please.
“Licorice Pizza” is a strange lingering concoction; while it wasn’t ‘love at first viewing’ for this critic, it lingers and interrupts my daydreams and has certainly inspired another helping.
