Paul Thomas Anderson (2021)
Most critics are keen on Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest – including some who don’t usually like his work (the converts include even Armond White). I usually do like Anderson but Licorice Pizza – save for the few minutes when Bradley Cooper is on screen – is a disappointing exception. Set in 1973, in the San Fernando Valley, this is a dual coming-of-age movie that is also an offbeat romantic comedy. The principals are fifteen-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana Kane (Alana Haim), ten years his senior. She’s a photographer’s assistant, who meets Gary for the first time at his high-school ‘picture day’, when he chats her up and asks to go out with her. She keeps saying no but they meet for dinner and become friends, despite an age difference that makes Alana uncomfortable.
The opening scene at the school is the last time I remember seeing Gary there: I was never clear if he was bunking off or if the story took place entirely during vacations or if Anderson simply wasn’t bothered with this kind of detail. Gary has been raised as a child actor – his mother, Anita (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), works in Hollywood – and gets paid for appearances in small roles and in commercials. When Anita can’t accompany him to a show in New York, Gary – a minor in need of a chaperone – asks Alana to step in. On the flight back, she gets into conversation with another young actor, Lance (Skyler Gisondo). They start dating; when Lance comes to dinner at Alana’s home, he’s forced to undergo her demanding Jewish parents and the romance ends. Gary turns himself into an entrepreneur. He starts a waterbed company, with Alana one of his employees – the business fails as a result of the 1973 international fuel crisis. Next, when pinball is legalised in California, he decides to open an arcade. In between the two ventures and after falling out with Gary, Alana starts working for a local politician, Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), who is running for mayor of Los Angeles. Wachs invites Alana out for drinks and asks her – to her consternation and that of Wachs’s partner (Joseph Cross) – if she’s willing to be a beard. Alana rushes off to the arcade to find Gary. He decides to hotfoot it to Wachs’s campaign office to find her. They bump into each other in the street, kiss and run out together into the night.
While Alana seems to be Anderson’s invention, many other characters are supposedly based on actual people – most still alive, few given their real names in the cast list. (The following details are all according to Wikipedia.) Gary Valentine is inspired by the child actor turned movie producer Gary Goetzman. When the film’s Gary goes to New York, it’s to appear in a show starring Lucy Dolittle (Christine Ebersole), aka Lucille Ball. Rex Blau (Tom Waits) is a film director inspired by Mark Robson. William Holden becomes Jack Holden (Sean Penn). Anderson doesn’t disguise the identity of Joel Wachs (who has enjoyed a long political career), Fred ‘Herman Munster’ Gwynne (a cameo from John C Reilly) or Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper) – in 1973 a Hollywood hairdresser and Barbra Streisand’s boyfriend. I knew who the last two were and wondered if Jack was named for William Holden but that was as far as I could read Licorice Pizza as a film à clef. I can’t know how much more fun it might have been for better informed viewers but I doubt this would have made much difference for me. Bradley Cooper’s performance is a treat not because I recognised an accurate impersonation of Jon Peters but for the actor’s comic skill and verve, in the physical presence he creates and the wit of his line readings. After Cooper’s, the turn I enjoyed most was Harriet Sansom Harris’s, in a brief appearance as Gary’s agent, another real person (Mary Grady) and someone of whom I’d never heard.
This isn’t to say that the other actors aren’t good. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper is a likeable and capable performer. Alana Haim is best known as a vocalist and musician in the rock band Haim, comprising her and her two elder sisters. (They appear as Alana’s sisters in the film – with the Haim parents playing the Kane parents.) It’s Haim who gives Licorice Pizza most of what energy it has – once you get over her distracting facial resemblance to Alan Cumming. It’s refreshing to see lead roles played by two young actors who aren’t conventionally pretty. The problem, rather, is with Anderson’s direction. He has previously shown, notably in The Master (2012) and Inherent Vice (2014), a striking disregard for making things easy for an audience. With those two films, the quality was exasperating but winning: it made stimulating demands on a viewer prepared to stay with the story despite its perplexing features. Anderson’s disregard is still in evidence in this new film but the effect is very different because the story is straightforward. This and Anderson’s unaccustomed genial tone may well account for the largely positive reception of Licorice Pizza but I found the result a tiresome spawl. Plenty of things happen but nothing develops. The film – whose working title was ‘Soggy Bottom’ (Gary’s waterbed company) – is named for a record store on Sunset Strip but even the pop soundtrack is a letdown, except for Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’. The end point is arbitrary, as if Anderson has simply decided that’s enough. To be fair, the decision comes as a relief.
10 January 2022
