‘LICORICE PIZZA’ IS MIGHTY SWEET
For all the delightful surprises packed into Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, it may not shock you to learn that it opens with a hell of a pickup scene.
How this filmmaker loves his hard-sell hustlers and go-for-broke dreamers, and what delicious words he gives them as they chase their desires: love and sex, sure, but also money, power, greatness. Think of the fashion designer flirting with a waitress in “Phantom Thread,” but also the oil baron greasing his way into a town’s good graces in “There Will Be Blood.” Think of the cult leader reaching out to a lost soul in “The Master,” dangling the possibility of salvation with an unmistakable hint of seduction.
That leader was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, which imparts a certain eerie exhilaration to the opening scenes of “Licorice Pizza.” The pickup artist here — played by Cooper Hoffman, the late actor’s son — is a 15-year-old go-getter with the showbiz-ready name of Gary Valentine. It’s picture day at a Tarzana high school in the mid-1970s, and Gary finds himself smitten with a photographer’s assistant named Alana Kane (Alana Haim). Unfazed by her age (she’s 25) or her disdain, he wears her down with nonstop chatter about his acting career, the PR company he runs with his mom and his insistence on taking Alana out to dinner. She doesn’t say yes, but as she turns away, a smile of surrender steals across her face.
By that point, she’s earned your surrender as well. Gary Valentine may be persistent, but Alana — and here I mean the actor and the character interchangeably — mounts a subtler charm offensive. Dark-haired and gimlet-eyed, with a natural warmth and wit that can quickly flare into indignation, she’s the star of this boisterous, bighearted movie and its raison d’être. “Valentine,” not coincidentally, is the title of one of several short films and music videos Anderson directed featuring the rock trio Haim, aka Alana and her older sisters, Este and Danielle. A valentine is also an apt description of what this movie is, namely, the most ardent love letter from a filmmaker to an actor in recent memory.
But “Licorice Pizza” is also more than that: a quasi-romantic comedy and a shaggy-dog epic, a riseand-fall portrait of a waterbed empire, a string of Hollywood tall tales, a peek inside the chambers of political power and — not to be redundant — a roundelay of men behaving badly. Anderson, cinematic-historical magpie that he is, draws inspiration from all directions: Much of the plot was drawn from anecdotes told by his friend Gary Goetzman, an actor, prolific
producer and loose stand-in for Gary Valentine.
While the specters of Robert Altman and Hal Ashby hover, not for the first time, over Anderson’s work, “Licorice Pizza” is neither as virtuosic an ensemble piece as “Magnolia” nor as whiplash-inducing an oddball coupling as “Punch-Drunk Love.” And while it may unfold in the vicinity of the ’70s porn empire from “Boogie Nights,” it pulls back the curtain on a far tamer, not necessarily kinder, corner of the entertainment industry.
One of the animating tensions of “Licorice Pizza” is that there’s so much swirling around Alana and Gary — so much color and chaos,
so much great music and flowery wallpaper — that it can almost distract from how much is also happening between them. Alana is impressed by Gary’s entrepreneurial smarts but also frustrated by his immaturity and self-absorption — and by her own inability to tear herself away.
You may forget some characters’ names, but the names of real-life businesses will stick in your head like commercial jingles: Tiny Toes, Fat Bernie’s and Tail o’ the Cock, the steak-and-margarita joint that is one of the movie’s key hangouts.
Funnily enough, one now-defunct retail haven we don’t visit is Licorice Pizza, a chain of record stores that proliferated across Southern California in the ’70s. Its very absence evokes a sense of loss, a fondness for bygone days of vinyl sifting and cassette shuffling — and, this being Anderson, of going to the movies, where countless stories, real, fictional or somewhere in between, are waiting to be excavated and unspooled.