The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Review: The sunny, shaggy ‘Licorice Pizza’ soaks up the ‘70s
It’s school picture day at a high school in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley in the opening scene of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1970s-set “Licorice Pizza.”
The photographer’s assistant, Alana (Alana Haim), strides up and down a long line of students waiting in the sunshine outside a gymnasium. She’s barely looking at any of them, but one makes himself noticed. Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) locks eyes with her and doesn’t let go, even as she does all she can to ignore him. He’s a 15-yearold actor, she’s in her 20s, but his attempted pick-up — sweetly direct, with a not entirely put-on maturity — makes her smile begrudgingly.
“You’re like a little Robert Goulet or Dean Martin,”
she says.
Anderson’s camera circles them as they walk, and though few moments quite match the magic of that opening, “Licorice Pizza” never stops pinballing to a sunny, infectious groove. Anderson’s ninth film, his shaggiest, most affectionate and maybe the one I most wanted to watch again immediately after it was over, is a charmingly loose love letter to the Valley of his youth, an ode to a bygone, pre-digital era, and a complete hoot.
“Licorice Pizza” takes its name from a regional record store from the time which never actually appears in the film. But the vinyl store’s absence only enhances the feeling that the light air of Anderson’s film belongs to a disappeared time. It was fairly recent, I think, that the ‘70s didn’t seem so very long ago. But that decade is now almost half a century removed from today — the same distance from the ‘70s to the flappers and speakeasies of the ‘20s.
With lush detail, oodles of verve and a soundtrack featuring David Bowie and Blood, Sweat & Tears, “Licorice Pizza” conjures a gentler, more shambolic time. It’s nostalgic, for sure, but laced with reminders of that era’s shortcomings, too. The spell of that opening shot, for example, is broken with a butt slap from an older man.
Against hallmark events of the era, like the gas crisis and the dawn of the water bed, Anderson follows the crisscrossing relationship between Gary and Alana. Alana refuses to accept Gary as a boyfriend but they have a hard-toarticulate bond — friends, business partners, maybe soul mates — that keeps them circling back to one another despite the awkward gap in age. In such a richly ‘70s specific film, their romance, like any love, exists out of time.
The whole film, shot in 35mm, feels like an assortment of memories and old, probably embellished tales. “Licorice Pizza,” full of comic set pieces and digressions, is based on the anecdotes of Gary Goetzman, a producer and actor best known as Tom Hanks’ producing partner. That Hollywood is just over the hill is a constant source of intrigue and farce. Sean Penn pops up as a stand-in for William Holden. A wonderfully over-the-top Bradley Cooper feverishly plays a Jon Peters, boyfriend to Barbra Streisand. Benny Safdie joins later as a local politician Alana volunteers for. As portraits of older men to Alana, they make Gary seem only more of a sweet, genuine exception.