Licorice Pizza
It seems odd to describe a film with as much incident and so many characters as “relaxed”, but with the new Licorice Pizza writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson has let both his heart and mind run free in a way we’ve never seen. The result is the most blissed-out film of a career that seems to be driving towards portraying new levels of emotional specificity on screen. Licorice Pizza isn’t without moments of gravity for its characters, but when I think about the movie and eventually see it again, I’ll be most moved by the shots of Alana (Alana Haim in an exceptional debut) and Gary (Cooper Hoffman) running. Running towards each other at times, but in a broader sense running towards joy.
We are in the San Fernando Valley of 1973. Anderson starts in a school bathroom on picture day as Gary and some other boys comb their hair, with 15-year-old Gary just a few moments away from meeting the person who will change his life. That person is of course Alana, age 25, who works for the photographers but who would (her boss slaps her bottom in the middle of the school gym) rather be almost anywhere else. It is worth asking who the main character of Licorice Pizza is exactly, because we are introduced to Gary as a teenaged pickup artist with unnerving confidence. Gary is comfortable asking out an older woman because he is already a working actor. The first big set piece of Licorice Pizza involves Gary and a passel of other child actors on a talk show performing a number from a movie starring a famous actress (Christine Ebersole) that sounds like it was based on this late-career Lucille Ball vehicle. Cooper Hoffman (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son) plays Gary with a vigor and a lack of guile that serve the movie well, but Anderson seems more invested in Alana. Gary’s family life isn’t shown in much detail – the movie has great fun with the idea that Gary has the resources to start a business – but Alana’s family life is depicted as a kind of old-world nexus of expectation and disappointment. Alana needs to “get her life together” (as she puts it), and the most affecting parts of Licorice Pizza involve Alana searching for a life in which she is treated with integrity. Care is taken to depict that Alana and her family are also proudly Jewish, and the movie takes place at a time when that is still enough to make Alana feel like an outlier. Alana Haim -of the band HAIM – gives a performance remarkable for its comic zing and vulnerability in equal measure.
Paul Thomas Anderson shows a complete lack of fear as a filmmaker in Licorice Pizza, structuring the movie in a series of short-story like segments but also unafraid to use silence. A sequence involving an older, well-known actor (Sean Penn, not taking himself too seriously) who is putting the moves on Alana becomes a sketch of Alana’s sadness as she realizes that Penn’s character only sees her as a way to feed his ego. (Tom Waits also scores in these scenes as an aging director.) Alana is repeatedly disappointed: later she’ll learn secrets about a politician (Benny Safdie) she’s working for that alter her view of him. One of the truest connections Alana makes in Licorice Pizza is with a man (Joseph Cross, another actor shining with brief screen time) who shares her sense that the world lets people down. Quieter moments work as well, as when Alana and Gary fall asleep on a waterbed that looks like a strip of celluloid or Alana navigating a gasless truck backwards down L.A. hills at night. The scene with the truck concludes a section of the film in which Gary, Alana, and their friends meet Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper, very funny), a real-life figure whose Hollywood career took him from hairdressing to a relationship with Barbra Streisand to producing movies. This character could have wrecked Licorice Pizza, but Cooper wisely underplays – Peters comes across as quietly out of his mind – and Anderson doesn’t linger on him. Peters is part of another Los Angeles that Alana and Gary bump into for a night.
Licorice Pizza ends on an emotional high, and it is the sort of movie where you’ll think about what happens to the characters after the credits roll. Anderson has pulled off a real mid-career – I’m being optimistic – triumph here; he seems to be peaking after the successes of Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread revealed a director with a bigger heart than we had first suspected. Let’s hope there is still a place in the culture for a filmmaker working in such a personal key who also has such command of craft. Licorice Pizza is stuffed with plot, character, laughter, sadness, longing, and incredible tracking shots, but what I’ll think about most is the light, and the joy, and the running,