Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, Benny
Safdie
Paul Thomas Anderson has followed up his masterwork
Phantom Thread
with another character drama centred around a May to December romance.
This time it's somewhat controversial, as one half of the central duo is
underage. But Licorice Pizza is set in 1973, when a
horndog teenage boy would be congratulated for getting together with a
woman 10 years his senior rather than being quizzed by the police and
social workers. Anderson has made a movie that not only looks like a
product of the era it's set in, but also resolutely refuses to judge a
less enlightened time. Along with making very little of the legal and
ethical ramifications of its attention grabbing central romance, it's
peppered with casual sexism, racism and anti-semitism. For anyone over a
certain age it will feel true to life, but for younger viewers it may
well be an experience akin to a first watch of some beloved 1970s
British sitcom.
Anderson's film is inspired by anecdotes recounted to him by the former
child actor turned producer Gary Goetzman, who as an entrepreneurial
teen started his own waterbed business and pinball arcade. The romantic
plotline came to Anderson when he was walking past a school and
witnessed a teenage boy hitting on a significantly older photographer's
assistant.
That overheard conversation gives us Licorice Pizza's spellbinding opening scene, in which we're introduced to the
characters of Gary and Alana, and the remarkable first-timers playing
them – Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman)
and Alana Haim (of the band Haim). 25-year-old photographer's
assistant Alana is tasked with wrangling high school kids for their end
of year photos and finds herself attracting the attention of the
confident and charming beyond his years 15-year-old Gary, who invites
her out to dinner.
Gary's claim of being a child actor isn't a line, he genuinely is a
rising star, and perhaps this is why Alana decides to throw caution to
the wind and meet him for dinner. Like Lorraine Bracco in
Goodfellas, she finds herself drawn into this exciting new world, but Gary is no
mobster - he's a super-intelligent, over-achieving teen with the world
at his feet. Rather than simply being a gold-digger, Alana sees
something in this kid that she hasn't found in the various deadbeats
she's dated, and she also sees a potential way out of her stunted life
at home with her parents.
Licorice Pizza plays a lot like the origin story of those
couples you see blind-buying storage vaults on reality shows. It's set
at a time when capitalism was still exciting, when young people were
excited for what the future might hold. The biggest crisis of the era, a
petrol shortage, seems almost charming on reflection. Gary's first
entrepreneurial adventure comes in selling that most '70s of items, the
waterbed mattress. Later he takes advantage of an amended bill that
allows for the legalisation of pinball arcades. Meanwhile Alana starts
working in the office of a political candidate (Benny Safdie)
whose idealism marks him as doomed from the off. This mix of politics,
liberation through entrepreneurship, a little bit of sex and its
vignette structure feels heavily influenced by the feminist
sexploitation movies of Stephanie Rothman and the "Nurses cycle" spawned
by her 1970 hit The Student Nurses.
The period recreation feels so authentic that
Licorice Pizza is clearly a movie inspired by its
director's childhood memories, and like Tarantino's
Once Upon a Hollywood, it mixes real-life recollections with the inspiration of countless
movies of the era. California's cinematic legacy is reflected by a
storytelling style that recalls early Cameron Crowe, Robert Altman, Hal
Ashby, Alan Rudolph and Jonathans Kaplan and Demme, along with a dash of
American Graffiti and the lighter output of Crown
International. And as with Tarantino's love letter to late 20th century
California, here fictional protagonists rub up against real life
characters. Some are disguised, with Sean Penn playing a
character based on William Holden (at one point Alana auditions for a
role clearly modelled on the Kay Lenz part from Clint Eastwood's
Breezy, another May to December story) and Christine Ebersole as a
Lucille Ball substitute. Surprisingly, the most unflattering portraits
are painted of characters whose identities aren't disguised. In a
somewhat meta piece of casting given his involvement with the
A Star is Born
franchise, Bradley Cooper plays hairdresser-turned-producer Jon
Peters as a coked out sociopath. Elsewhere
John Michael Higgins and Harriett Sansom Harris play a
real-life San Fernando Valley restaurateur and acting agent
respectively. Both are mockingly portrayed as ignorant bigots, which
makes you wonder what sort of encounters Anderson had with the pair in
his youth.
As you might expect from Anderson, the filmmaking is technically
outstanding. His ever-roaming camera sweeps us along with his energetic
protagonists, who always seem to be running towards some new exploit,
some new potential across town. Once again Anderson proves himself the
greatest imitator of Hal Ashby's editing style, with a sequence that
opens at a teenage pop culture fair and ends in a police precinct cut to
a single piece of music in a manner that recalls the standout "Time Has
Come Today" sequence of
Coming Home.
But for all his technical virtuosity, it's for his work with his two
debuting performers that Anderson should be most applauded. In their
first scene together Hoffman and Haim make us feel like they've been
acting for decades and have already reached the peak of their
profession. Such is their chemistry that you quickly forget about the
controversial age factor, and frankly I never bought into the idea of
Alana being a decade older than Gary (even though Haim is actually 13
years Hoffman's senior!). Whether this is a flaw of the film's failure
to address its central dynamic or a sign that Anderson and his
performers are doing such great work that it becomes inconsequential
will be for individual viewers to decide.
