Film Review: Licorice Pizza
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures Australia.
Paul Thomas Anderson, often affectionately known as ‘PTA’, is a filmmaker fascinated by relationships. That’s a broad subject, but his films, widely seen as some of the greatest of the last 20-odd years, often feature at their centre two people with a unique, inexpressible, powerful connection. Think of Phantom Thread’s gothic romance, The Master’s mentor-and-disciple symbiosis, There Will Be Blood’s fraught father and son. They’re always a little bit hard to grasp, a little mysterious, but we’re always drawn to these collisions of characters.
His ninth, newest film – the intriguingly titled Licorice Pizza – has just such a relationship. To wit, it’s defined by it. The joy of this film (and it is filled with reasons to be joyful) is in the discovery of two captivating, fully-formed people, and the way they bounce off each other. But while PTA’s existing filmography, particularly recently, has felt incredibly tightly wound, Licorice Pizza is loose, relaxed: he trades in volatility for youthful nirvana, a cold drink on a hot day. The film is set in California’s San Fernando valley in the 70s, and comes across a paean to Anderson’s childhood in that place and time.
We follow 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman), as he scores a date with 20-something Alana Kane (Alana Haim, youngest of the extremely cool sister-act band HAIM). Gary is such a wonderful character: he’s a teenage hustler, we barely see him in school, instead he’s out setting up entrepreneurial schemes and charming the pants off of everyone with his absurd confidence. He’s a force of nature, working at people and pushing for things, and somehow it always goes his way. You can’t tell if he’s mesmerising or laughable. He’ll walk into a bar with the familiarity of an old punter: a greeting from the owner, smiles all around, and the galaxy-brain joke of it all is that even though he’s a fifteen year old kid, you totally get why everyone treats him this way.
Cooper Hoffman in the role (his first) is spellbinding on his own. You can feel his father in some of his mannerisms, but more importantly you can feel the real kid in every mischievous smile and fresh-faced stare. He lights up the screen, and in a very funny movie, he’s consistently hilarious.
Equally stunning is Alana Haim as his co-lead. She has the most varied and empathetic work to do here, and in her own first acting job, she nails it. One of the things that makes her such a revelation is that she’s just so excellent at portraying anger: the Alana character is a live wire who can turn crimson very quickly, and Haim is never less than perfect in her embodiment of that endearing temper. She has this kind of scrappy, “terrier energy” that PTA himself has spoken about in interviews, but always grounded in vulnerability. She’s yearning for something.
There’s this beautiful match in the film’s central pairing: you’ve got two characters, one who is grasping desperately at adulthood, and another who is coming to realise that she misses, and wants to hold on to, something about her teenage years. Perhaps it’s the freedom she’s drawn to. I’ve seen Alana already compared to Wendy, along for the ride with Gary’s Peter Pan and the gang of Lost Boys that is his little brother and friends. There’s an inevitability to her and Gary’s relationship – one that they’re often trying to outrun. But their bond becomes symbiotic, and ever-shifting. It’s a question of who has power over the other, who seems stronger without the other, who needs the other more – but unlike much of PTA’s other films, this isn’t a master and an apprentice, or the like. It’s two kids in the 70s San Fernando valley.
As much as the setting of the film gives it its personality, there’s elements of that which you could bump on. First of all, PTA chooses to include some pretty gross, racist jokes that some of these 70s men make about Asian characters in the film. I don’t think those moments add much, and they left a bad taste in my mouth, regardless of whether or not they’re drawn from reality. And likewise, PTA has depicted this era before, in Boogie Nights and Inherent Vice. It’s familiar territory for him, but that doesn’t weigh him down – it’s clear that the 70s setting is crucial to this film. Watching, you feel constantly that this is a world where to reach someone, you can’t just instant-message them, and that informs everything the characters are doing. It needs the grounding that choice brings.
There’s a real lack of modern cinematic scale to this story, and it’s all the better for it. Take Alana Haim – that’s a person who is literally a rock star, but she (and everyone else in this movie) isn’t coded as capital-G glamourous. She’s a kid, so is Gary. It’s a film that PTA has clearly made on his own terms – he is one of the few working filmmakers who has the clout and the experience to make a loose, idiosyncratic ode to his youth in Los Angeles. It’s hard not to fall in love with that. Licorice Pizza is a relatively plotless assortment of scenes, where around every corner lurks an inspired filmmaking flourish, often in what feels like a throwaway moment… whether it’s a perfect (and I mean perfect) soundtrack choice, or a genius series of cuts: all of a sudden you realise you’re seeing something magical.
The movie has this feeling of lovingly, vividly recreated memory, and it gives it all a very specific and very enchanting perspective: what will these two mean to each other in ten years? In twenty? At times it feels like Gary & Alana are pulling a fast one on everybody, like they’re getting away with something… the film is imbued with that mischievousness and it carries you from scene to scene. Indeed, the logic of this story isn’t narrative logic, not particularly – it’s emotional. Scenes end when you feel them the strongest, time passes without warning or hesitation, events progress according to the phase in Gary and Alana’s relationship.
I’ve seen other critics identify running as a visual theme – characters sprint, toward what they want, toward safety from a threat, toward each other – and that feels perfect for Licorice Pizza. The trajectory of the film advances at a gallop, then it catches its breath, then Gary & Alana are barrelling at each other again. These two stick in your mind, and not because of anything flashy about the story. The movie is just made with such warmth that their characters, already so well-sketched, come to life. I loved that. It seems almost momentous that for a filmmaker whose work always deepens for me upon rewatch, this is the film of his that I can see myself, as the years go by, revisiting the most.
Licorice Pizza is showing in cinemas across Australia from Saturday the 25th of December.