Review: the delicious disruptions of Licorice Pizza
For the last thirty years, Paul Thomas Anderson has been conducting a postmortem of twentieth century U.S. history through the lens of Los Angeles County. With a consistency of vision that more closely resembles the dry glare of Joan Didion, or the unforgiving, bullying glower of Raymond Chandler, than that of other Hollywood filmmakers, his work has infiltrated and sabotaged crucial, historic subsets of the city’s socio-cultural fabric: from the pre-Y2K hysteria of a TV-bred populace in Magnolia (1999) to the frank barbarism of oil barons in turn-of-the-century There Will Be Blood (2007) to the lipid yet exploitative self-aggrandizement of mid-century Scientologists in The Master (‘12).
Through it all, though, Anderson has displayed an unflagging devotion to the 1970s — a period that not only constituted his childhood, and that marked a tidal shift in how most Americans viewed or interacted with their country (e.g. the Black Power and Women’s Liberation movements, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, the Watergate scandal), but that introduced an unprecedented degree of formal artistry to American movies. Mr. Anderson has cited all-star directors of the era like Robert Altman (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville) and Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) as major influences, and his liveliest, most colorful work tends to be set in this decade: Boogie Nights (1997) is a sunny yet sinister panorama of the pornographic film business, while Inherent Vice (2014) is a cryptic gumshoe’s romp through L.A.’s seedy nightlife.
And now, Licorice Pizza — its title (taken from a former chain of Southern California record stores) a perfect synthesis of Anderson’s style: two delectable fixtures of Americana that have no common flavor profile, yet which, when held beside one another, communicate a single, thrilling reality. Fun.
Dizzying in its episodic freedom, the movie chronicles the exploits of Alana (Alana Haim), a directionless twenty-five-year-old who lives with her parents and works as a photographer’s assistant, and Gary (Cooper Hoffman), an ambitious fifteen-year-old and former child actor. The pair meet at Gary’s high school picture day; he flirts with her, she dismisses him — yet, despite their differences in age and focus, they go out to dinner and presently form a kind of ragtag partnership. Together, they collaborate to, in turn, launch Alana’s acting career, operate a waterbed business and open a pinball arcade.
Wedged into the nooks and crannies of these ventures are mistaken cops, closeted politicians, and deranged film producers — all representing or reacting against different opportunities that Gary and Alana strive to conquer. Much of the charm to Licorice Pizza is its characters’ boundless energy, their willingness to try yet another scheme that holds dubious promises of glory. They treat every undertaking as some sort of grand resolution; to what, it’s unclear, though eventually the viewer realizes that these two could go on forever, planting flags in L.A.s’ constantly shifting bedrock.
Ellipses and disorientation have always been part of Anderson’s slacker-meets-hitman vibe, and he uses his rabid stylistic flare to orchestrate many moments of breathtaking comedy in Licorice Pizza — often tossing ruptures in the plot at his audience before patiently waiting for subsequent scenes to help it all make sense. For example, after his rocky yet magical first date with Alana, Gary is told by his mother (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) that he won’t be able to go to New York for a TV appearance because he needs a guardian, and she has a prior commitment.
“You can’t fly without a guardian,” she says… and the camera tracks in on Gary’s face. We know what he’s thinking. We know who he has in mind to play his “guardian.”
We smile, ready for a charming scene where Gary will hassle his reluctant love interest to come with him — but then there’s a cut, and bam! He and Alana are already on the plane together. This is a leap in narrative continuity that could give Ernst Lubitsch whiplash, glorious both for its intelligence and for Anderson’s inference that he trusts us to keep up with him.
For all its raucousness, though, Licorice Pizza is a sound and well-structured home of a movie, which Mr. Anderson leases out to one of the most sublime supporting casts I’ve ever seen: Skyler Gisondo plays a former child actor with the dazed grin, crinkly eyes and clueless pickup lines (“Como esta?”) of a seventy-five-year-old Floridian who spends all his days on the golf course; John Michael Higgins, famous for his appearances on TV commercials, is here an opportunistic, racist restaurateur who — in a crushing yet nearly invisible subplot — exploits his Japanese wife’s (Yumi Mizui) good taste to establish his business before replacing her with a younger woman (Megumi Anjo); John C. Reilly as Fred Gwynne (“Yes, I’m the real Herman Munster!”); Christine Ebersole as a screeching, potty-mouthed stand-in for Lucille Ball; and Sean Penn gives William Holden so well that it borders on the prophetic. (He: “You remind me of Grace.” Alana: “Kelly?”)
But the standout supporting performances, as far as I’m concerned, are Harriet Sansom Harris as Gary’s agent, Mary Grady, and Bradley Cooper as film producer and Barbra Streisand’s (“Strei-sand’s”) boyfriend, Jon Peters. Their respective scenes may be the highlights of the movie: watch as Sansom Harris’ whole face quivers in reverence for Alana (“You remind me of a dog… of an English, pit-bull dog… with sex appeal… and… a very Jewish nose!”), or as Mr. Cooper, with his Davy Jones haircut and white tracksuit, inexplicably appears on the side of a hill like Michael Myers back from the dead, and try not to howl with laughter.
This is to say nothing of Ms. Haim and Mr. Cooper, two first-time actors of staggering charisma and effortless nuance. They both deserve every good thing that Hollywood and the rest of the United States have to offer — so it will be interesting to see if they find or gravitate towards future projects that are as fully-realized as this one.
It’s hard to come by wide-release American movies that match Paul Thomas Anderson’s precise vision nowadays… but then again, it always has been. Genius is fragmentary, and it’s rare that a given filmmaker’s visceral creative discipline — if they even have one — is matched by an ability to entertain.
Licorice Pizza secures Mr. Anderson’s status as the worthiest, most disciplined entertainer working in American movies today.
