Licorice Pizza, the latest offering from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, is a fun and very sweet romance set in the San Fernando Valley of LA in the early 1970’s. Starring Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Alana Haim in the lead roles, the film tracks the pitfalls and excitement of first love. Featuring a cast mainly populated by newcomers to a PTA film, Licorice Pizza is a breezy and seemingly effortless work of nostalgic fancy set against the Hollywood film scene of the era.
Gary Valentine is a precocious 15 year old film star who lives in LA and uses the money he makes to invest in various business ventures for himself and his family. When he meets Alana Kane at his high school photo day, he’s undaunted by their ten year age gap and immediately asks her out. They go on to develop a friendship which is equal parts crush and rivalry, enjoying each other’s company in a set of adventures that teach both of them the value of companionship and certain hard truths about the onslaught of adulthood.
The film benefits from what is now Anderson’s lengthy career, midway through it’s third decade. With an almost lazy, but still deeply enthusiastic level of confidence, the director manages to create characters, set pieces and exchanges of dialogue which not only smack of real world experience, but go further in producing something genuinely unique and out of the ordinary. The script is a miracle of well timed chaos, with each scene seeming like merely a snippet of a conversation that continues throughout the entire film and even branches into the imagined before and after. This isn’t to say that it feels in any way unpolished or like a work in progress. Indeed, the effect is that of an effortless balance between lively exuberance and tender understanding. Anderson demonstrates in this film (not for the first time) that he can execute moments that show the quiet and ordinary aspects of life, without the zeal and dramatic weight of more lofty circumstances and characters.
The cast of Licorice Pizza all perform exceptionally well. Aside from the leads and more seasoned actors, this fact is doubly impressive when you consider the amount of children with small roles throughout. Each young performer is allowed to shine briefly and, with credit also due to the direction and editing by Anderson’s more recent collaborator Andy Jurgensen, they all stand out as well executed moments of youthful confidence.
The highlights are undoubtedly the performances of both Hoffman and Haim. Each making their debut as actors, the two leads bring to the film a fresh faced sense of uncoached and deliberate force of character. Alana Haim is especially good in what is potentially the meatier role. Her portrayal of a young woman unsure of her skills or direction in life is an absolute joy to watch. Anderson provides for Alana an almost nail-bitingly climactic scene wherein the character demonstrates her unassailable capacity to deal with whatever life throws up. In the end (a rapturous and stunningly beautiful sequence), the audience has seen Alana Kane develop into a young woman capable of learning from her experience and taking herself where she wants to go in life.
With brief, but singularly brilliant cameo appearances from Sean Penn, Tom Waits and Bradley Cooper (not to mention the astoundingly good Harriet Sansom Harris), Licorice Pizza is a feel-great depiction of youth and innocence not so much lost as challenged. Anderson brings each element of his script together in a weightless and joyous spectacle of young love. The film gives the audience a chance to reimagine or encounter their past experiences as fondly as the director obviously does with his own. Knowing just when and how to end things, Paul Thomas Anderson proves again that his life and loves have taught him plenty about the act of storytelling in a vastly enjoyable film experience.
5/5
Get Ya Shinebox Reviews 