Really fresh ingredients: “Licorice Pizza” (2021)

Licorice Pizza. A vinyl album (“LP” - get it?) Also, a record store in California back in the day. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest is an ode to the period of my coming of age, taking place in early 1973. It’s a hugely affectionate coming of age tale played out against the backdrop of Southern California, specifically the San Fernando Valley and a bitchin’ soundtrack.

It’s been referred to as a shaggy dog story, and I suppose it is. It is certainly episodic and you aren’t really sure where any single episode is going nor do you care. You do, however, care about the protagonists, Gary Valentine, a 15 year old soon to be former child actor with a penchant for quick side hustles, and the woman he tells his friend Gary he’s going to marry, Alana Kane. Both are played by two remarkable first-time actors who have direct relationships to the director. Gary is Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Alana is played by Alana Haim, lead singer for the sister band Haim, whose siblings and parents also appear in the film.

After “Phantom Thread”, Anderson has produced a film that feels more intimate than much of his work, which is saying something since there is a certain intimacy in all the films in his oeuvre, however uncomfortable. What we have on hand, though, may be his sweetest film. I hasten to add that it is neither cloying nor sentimental in the least but it is wistful, poignant, and very often, funny.

Because it is composed of so many small arcs, it would be ludicrous to attempt a recap (each successive paragraph would be “and then, this happened”) but the gist of it is that we see Gary waiting in a line at school where Alana is handing out flyers for free photos. Almost immediately, Gary hits on Alana, who at 25 is ten years older than him, but he frankly doesn’t care and she nips his ardor in the bud, so to speak. Or tries to. She lays down the law that she’s not interested and while recognizing how weird this is, she does meet him later for drinks (two cokes) at a neighborhood restaurant where he’s well known and warmly received. Why does she show up? For the same reason anyone might; he’s a weird kid, precocious at Orson Welles levels, and oddly not off-putting. In fact, both our leads project charisma to burn.

They settle for being friends and before long, Alana is accompanying Gary to a publicity jaunt in New York for a film he’s in, “Under One Roof”, a faux movie title based on or mapped on “Yours, Mine, and Hours” about a widow who winds up with 18 kids played by Lucille Ball. Christine Ebersole plays the Lucy character in a stage performance with the kids, during which Gary pops her in the back of the head with a pillow and draws down fire from her afterward. 

The first sign of fissure in the relationship between Gary and Alana is glimpsed as she falls for one of Gary’s peers (I’m assuming “older peer”) and begins dating him only to have that go south when she invites her swain over for dinner and ruffles her family’s feathers by announcing his atheism and refusing to say the blessing at Passover.

Gary’s schadenfreude is palpable but contained and by now, he’s ventured to start a new venture; selling waterbeds. He’s aging out of roles and to Anderson’s credit, we don’t linger on this; Gary is fueled by one of the most naively and giddily optimisms I’ve seen in films. He launches the business, we assume with money from his earnings, and keeps going until Nixon announces OPEC’s oil embargo in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. Alana tells Gary that this is going to impact his business where she is his assistant and we assume he plans accordingly, wrapping up with one last score; selling a deluxe number to Jon Peters played by Bradley Cooper to exquisite, smarmy, weird perfection.

I hasten to mention that while Gary launched the waterbed business, he also helped Alana get an audition with William John Holden, played by Sean Penn in another example of spot-on casting. I mention this because there is an entire episode within the waterbed narrative where Alana agrees to join Holden for drinks at the neighborhood joint - The Cock o’ the Tail (which was a real restaurant in the area at the time) - and this goes sideways, too. Gary shows up and takes a booth in the sight line to watch Alana flirt with Holden unrepentantly. We gauge from what the maitre d’ said that Gary may have been prone to cause a scene in the past and while that doesn’t happen here, lunacy takes over in the guise of Tom Waits.

Waits shows up as a kind of John Huston figure and tells Holden he has a special surprise for him outside. In short order, the entire restaurant is led out to the golf course where Holden and Alana mount a super up motorcycle that Holden is going to jump through a bonfire. Immediately, upon the first acceleration, Alana is unceremoniously dropped on her back with her guitar breaking her fall. Gary runs to her rescue and their friendship survives one more hurdle.

The Peters Episode is another straw, though. In a remarkable sequence, Cooper’s Jon Peters threatens Gary and bullies him while also telling him how much he likes him, that they’re both “from the street” (paging Kevin Smith!) Gary may not be as intimidated as he lets on, but apparently is pissed enough to walk off the job with his brothers and Alana and leave the hose filling up the waterbed on the second floor.

They run into Peters coming up the road and give him a lift back to his house where he picks up an empty gas can (shortages at the pump were a real thing, kids). They take him back to and abandon him at a gas station that itself is a pretty hilarious scene within a scene and decide it’s a good idea to drive back to Jon’s Ferrari to vandalize it. That gas shortage? OH, but my. Out of gas, Alana guides the truck down the hill until they come to a stop at an intersection where Gary and his brothers head off to go get gas, leaving Alana to rest on a curb and re-evaluate her life and involvement with kids ten years her junior. Particularly when those same kids return and pantomime jerking off and blowing the nozzles on the gas canisters. Never mind that Jon Peters finds his way in the background to hit on a couple of girls (after doing the same to Alana in the truck’s cab in front of Gary).

Before long, Alana has decided to grow up and volunteers for Joel Wachs’ mayoral campaign (a real councilman who held office for three decades is played by Benny Safdie  - the casting is beautiful in this throughout.) She and Gary are sitting reading the paper at the table in his kitchen as we overhear Wachs discussing the legalization of pinball machines in California for the first time since 1939. Pinball was legalized in California in 1974, so I think we might assume that that amount of time has passed. As it is, Gary pisses Alana off by floating the idea of going into opening a pinball arcade. She lights into him because, despite all the change going on around him, all he can think about is himself and making a killing.

Gary is just guileless or clueless to admit as much and Alana decides she’s had enough. The opening night of the arcade is a success, Alana is asked to meet the councilman for drinks and discovers he’s in relationship with a man and the heartbreak she feels when she sees Joel berate Matthew is clear. After she says goodnight to Matthew (Joel basically asked her to take him home as a beard), she realizes she misses Gary and he - by this time - has gone hunting for her. They meet, embrace and fall down in front of a theater playing “Live and Let Die” and Charles Bronson’s “The Mechanic” (this renders the pinball narrative anachronistic, since the Bond film was a ‘73 release and the Bronson pic was 1972..or not? Second runs?)

They return to the arcade, happily reunited and Alana declares her love for Gary.

Okay. None of this on its own sounds all that compelling, but trust me that the movie is more than I’ve recounted and has a wonderful emotional truth at its center that provides  momentum through each of the film’s beats. Hoffman and Haim are revelations, with Haim edging out her male lead ever so. She glows in this medium and I hope we see more of them both.

This is also the first film where Anderson has taken a Director of Photography credit. He shot “Phantom Thread” but owing to union rules couldn’t be credited. Here, he partners with Michael Bauman and the result is striking; the color palates and set-ups are striking and support the story (and the set design and props are on par with Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”). Interestingly, this is Bauman’s first major cinematography gig.

Trying to convey how strong the script is or again, how on-point the performances are is almost pointless. The film maintains its wistfulness and wit throughout and I found myself ceasing to care about the age difference between Gary and Alana. Both are trying so hard to grow up. The one is play-acting at it while the other is just trying to figure out where she is. That they seem to exist outside of time speaks to how well the actors embodied these temporally star-crossed kids.

The dialog crackles and Anderson remains truer to the slang of the times than many of his peers who have set films in the period. This added a layer of authenticity that I found so bracing I forgot that the director is himself twelve years younger than I am. (And he captured the feel for my younger days as well as Richard Linklater in “Dazed and Confused”!)

There are moments when I reflect on how Anderson was received early on as a Scorsese-lite. I never quite believed that; it would be churlish to ignore Scorsese’s influence on younger generations of filmmakers and Anderson, like David O. Russell - another tarred with the same brush, has always had his own voice, one that’s gotten stronger with each passing feature.

It’s staggering how high the quality of each of these films is. The wrinkles of drifting and sometimes disappearing up his own ass (“Boogie Nights” a little bit; but “Magnolia” much more - and let’s be clear; I like “Magnolia”) have been ironed out and he is in full possession of his stories. I disagree with critics who say that “Inherent Vice” is overstuffed or merely empty meandering. It’s not a tale given to concision and it still flies by. Certainly, “There Will Be Blood”, “The Master”, and “Phantom Thread” are masterpieces, and “Punch-Drunk Love”, like the present work is a lovely little tale of ardor and genuine caring for another refracted, admittedly, through a somewhat unstable psyche, but so beautifully told.

After the whiz bang of some of the more bigger movies from the past season, it was genuinely nice to walk out of a human scale tale. This and “Red Rocket” may take the Barrett Award for Best Small(ish) Films from last year.