Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the acclaimed filmmakers of our time, and most divisive. I’ve liked a couple of them (his early work, Hard Eight and Boogie Nights) and hated others (Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love). Mostly, I like Licorice Pizza, a coming-of-age story set in early-1970s Los Angeles. The film features Anderson’s trademark wry dialogue and expansive performances as well as sequences that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. I also had very personal reactions to parts of it, which I will explain in a bit.
Anderson’s comic drama introduces us to 15-year-old Gary (Cooper Hoffman, the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, making his film debut), a hustler who takes an instant liking to older Alana (Alana Haim, a popular singer making her film debut). Their developing friendship is a rocky one, tested by friends and family, business opportunity, jealousy, ego and mostly sabotaged by each other. But they keep returning to each other, the way great film couples always do.
As a coming-of-age piece, the film works tremendously well. The two leads are quite good — Alana Haim is little short of magnificent — and the chemistry they share is palpable. Even when stuff too weird to be real seems to be happening, they make it compelling. And being a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, things certainly get weird. This time, happily, there are no frogs falling from the sky, but the episodic film features the introduction of waterbeds, an election involving a candidate with a secret, the 1973 oil crisis, music and film producer Jon Peters, a pinball arcade, close imitations of real movies and television programs with their names changed for legal reasons and more. It all results in a film that covers a lot of ground but doesn’t have much to say other than that eventually love conquers all.
Anderson’s films are almost always overlong and often overly complicated. The biggest sin here involves Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), whom Gary and his family (who all work for him) run across during a waterbed delivery. The film takes twenty minutes or more to show him meeting and threatening Gary, hitting on Alana and then searching for gas a little later. The film’s preview has a sequence where he is destroying cars on camera, but this sequence did not make it into the finished film (I kept waiting for it, thinking Peters still had to return to the story). Frankly, everything involving Peters could have been excised without losing any real substance. It doesn’t add anything except proving that Alana has great driving skill. Another subplot, this one involving a mysterious guy hanging around the congressional candidate’s election office, never comes to any conclusion, despite heavy hints that a violent tragedy is in the making. This seems like the Harvey Milk situation, but with no resolution.
Once in a while a movie I see touches something really personal for me. This one did, twice. First is the character of Jack Holden (Sean Penn), an actor who takes a liking to Alana and recites lines from his famous Korean War film “The Bridges of Toko-San.” This, of course, is supposed to be William Holden, and the movie “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” which was changed, I am assuming, for legal reasons. I covered this real 1954 movie extensively in my second book, Korean War Filmography, and while Penn is reciting his Jack Holden lines from the fake-titled movie, I was reciting them right along with him in the theater because I recognized them instantly and knew them nearly as well. Furthermore, much of the film is set at the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant, a real place that I visited during the summer of 1980. In the film, Holden meets director Rex Blau (Tom Waits), a cigar-smoking wild man who encourages the actor to try a motorcycle stunt on the golf course behind the restaurant. It has been suggested that Blau is actually supposed to be John Huston or Sam Peckinpah, but I think it may be Jack Arnold, the one-legged, cigar-smoking director who was a regular patron of that restaurant when I met him and interviewed him there the summer of 1980. Really, it was like seeing him again, and it was spooky.
Generally I like Licorice Pizza (slang for record albums, “LPs”), mainly because the Alana character is so original and charming. I’m not familiar with the Haim family’s music, but Anderson actually directs their music videos, one of which, “Lost Track,” actually plays before the movie itself, contributing to its two-and-a-half hour running time. A family affair, this film is clearly made with a lot of love and devotion. Anderson has worked with Haim for years, resulting in this feature film, and one of his best friends was Philip Seymour Hoffman, resulting in him offering the lead to Philip’s son Cooper. He makes movies like nobody else. He is an auteur in the truest sense of the word, and this movie may be his most accessible. It’s a film I will gladly revisit in the future, and I definitely recommend it. ☆ ☆ ☆. 9 February 2022.