Featuring a pair of novice performances that will either make the actors stars or preserve them in cinematic amber as these exact characters, the 1973-set Licorice Pizza marks an ambling, deceptively breezy, and incredibly sweet effort from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. Cooper Hoffman (son of the late PTA collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Alana Haim (one third of the sister indie band Haim) star as Gary and Alana. A 15-year-old charmer with the air of a midlife mover and shaker (think of a kinder Max Fischer from Rushmore or a sunnier version of Max’s forebear: Harold and Maude’s Harold), Gary meets the twentysomething Alana (she’s fuzzy about her age) at his San Fernando Valley high school, where she’s working as an assistant to the photographer taking class pictures. (Anderson films their “meet cute” as a bravura, perfectly timed montage of long takes across campus.) What follows isn’t a romance, exactly, or a friendship, particularly, but something more ephemeral, mysterious, special. (If you thought Reynolds and Alma had a strange relationship in Anderson’s Phantom Thread, just wait.) Cooper captures the chutzpah of a teenager who starts his own waterbed business, as Gary does, but he’s even more impressive in those moments where Gary second-guesses himself and a childlike uncertainty undermines the grownup posturing. Haim is a firecracker, making Alana a take-no-prisoners young woman embracing the relative liberation of the early ’70s who nonetheless is still drawn to the less-fraught free-ranginess of childhood. Together, as actors and characters, they’re magical. (Meanwhile, the likes of Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, and Tom Waits are having all sorts of fun in comic bit parts, with Cooper offering a maniacal riff on infamous Hollywood producer Jon Peters.) Licorice Pizza meanders a bit (it’s closest in vibe, among Anderson’s filmography, to Inherent Vice) and may lean too heavily on pop, rock, and soul hits of the era, but every 20 minutes or so the film perks up with an inspired filmmaking flourish. One of these is a climactic montage of Gary and Alana racing across the screen, independently, in which Anderson and editor Andy Jurgensen slip in two shots of the characters running from earlier in the movie. It’s a tiny but perceptive touch, as Licorice Pizza ultimately registers as an affectionate portrait of two people vacillating back and forth between adolescence and adulthood, an experience neither might survive if they didn’t, oddly, have each other.
(12/16/2021)
