Licorice Pizza (2021 | USA | 133 minutes | Paul Thomas Anderson)
I am fully in the tank for Paul Thomas Anderson; so the release of any new film from one of the greatest living American filmmakers marks a significant occasion to be celebrated. With that caveat in mind, Licorice Pizza, his deeply romantic tale of young strivers in the Valley, feels like a special holiday delivery with one of those giant novelty bows on it made especially for me. In the contrast to the icy focus of Phantom Thread (which vies for a spot on the summit of my ever-shifting rankings of his oeuvre), he’s returned to the wide-open sprawl of Southern California. Where Boogie Nights and Magnolia reckoned with ambitions hitting their natural limits, Licorice Pizza revels in the boundless optimism of youth. People may quibble about where it ranks in his pantheon, but I’ll happily take a hundred slices of this shaggy story of feeling of infinite possibilities.
Broadly speaking, Licorice Pizza is a love story, but in a sense Anderson’s tale of teenage Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s talented son making his first big screen appearance) and his starry-eyed pursuit of twentysomething Alana Kane (a radiant debut from musician Alana Haim) is merely a connective tissue for him to reminisce on his youth in the San Fernando Valley in the late 1970s. Gary, a mildly successful child actor on the verge of leaving the cute kid roles in favor of being typecast for acne commercials, is instantly smitten with Alana when she catches his eye on school picture day. A big talker, he’s grown up too fast in the company of adults and shows no sign of intimidation, inviting her for a drink later that night at “his” swanky local bar. It’s easy to understand his immediate attraction. Her reasons for taking him up on his offer are more complex, a result of bemused curiosity at his salesmanship borne from being unsure where her life is heading that leaves her to see where a friendship with Gary goes.
The directions it takes are consistently surprising and visually enrapturing, from flat sunny days to the glow of neon nights. While his father made for a mesmerizing and calculating cult figure in The Master, Cooper Hoffman plays Gary as an open-hearted entrepreneur whose seemingly infinite self-confidence allows him to bend reality to his will. Or at least to be flexible enough to pivot himself into the spotlight, be it acting gigs, waterbed sales, filmmaking, or launching an arcade, always at just the right moment. He’s kind of a strange latchkey kid, but the gravity of his preternatural drive somehow keeps Alana in his orbit. Almost certainly too old for him and definitely out of his league, she’s in her early twenties, still living at home with her sisters and under the strict watch of her Israeli parents (casting the real Haim family, her bandmate sisters as well as her actual parents was a stroke of genius). Yearning for anything to shake up her stalled routine, she gets pulled in to be his chaperone on a junket to New York, ends up driving him around town, and becomes a collaborator in his various ventures. She recognizes that maybe it’s weird that she hangs out with him and his underage pals, but when you see their joint charisma and the thrill of so much novelty it kind of makes sense.
Although Gary may initially seem like the protagonist in thiscoming-of-age story, Alana’s navigation of the life she has and the life she wants makes her, by far, the richer and more compelling figure. She’s a radiant and expressive first time actor who must have developed a rapport with him from their many music video collaborations; so spending time with her is a treat. As these young people oscillate toward and away from each other to figure out their own lives, they intersect with some big personalities in the Valley.
These periodic interludes give the film jolts of electricity and convey the sense that anything can happen if you’re at the right place at the right time. An earnest political campaign (featuring Benny Safdie as an idealistic city council member and would-be mayor) provides a window into the way that starry-eyed optimism can be tarnished when confronted with harsh reality. A vindictive visit to a bar introduces Sean Penn and Tom Waits in an amazing sequence of boastful beyond-its-expiration-date acting and spectacularly ill-advised stuntwork. And a waterbed delivery to a hilltop mansion brings both the film’s most outstandingly deranged high-wire performance (from Bradley Cooper as real-life Hollywood producer, Jon Peters) as well as a stunt driving sequence that was more thrilling than anything in F9. There’s also a recurring joke of an embarrassment of a character meant to skewer the emerging Japan-ophilia of the era, but the less said of this cultural insensitivity the better.
The story points are fine, but it’s the way that Anderson films these kids stumbling through their lives that makes Licorice Pizza visually and sonically compelling on a minute-to-minute basis. Like other Anderson (Wes), PTA reliably delivers a phenomenal soundtrack and fills his superbly considered frames with period details. Although they’re both meticulous directors whose work I adore, only one of them never feels fussy. From masterful wide shots, to trademark long unbroken takes that communicate the era’s energy by snaking through bustling scenes, his camera always finds the most compelling actions, be they grand or small.
Anderson’s drawing from his own memories, so this depiction of the 1970s, amid an oil embargo, when only one of the main characters is old enough to drive is a particularly vibrant and obviously personal. Characters are always on bicycles, skirting the lines of cars queued for scarce gasoline or cutting from place to place on foot. There’s an exceptional amount of running, centering the tone as one of youthful energy unwilling to let a moment go to waste. Watching them figure out whether they’re running toward or away from each other is a fantastic way to wrap up this year. The delivery may have taken a while, but it was worth the wait.
Licorice Pizza finally arrives in theaters — including SIFF’s Uptown — on December 24th.