Whichever way you slice it, LICORICE PIZZA is arguably the best rom com since Punch Drunk Love. Paul Thomas Anderson’s film has a surprising title and surprise is the essential ingredient in LICORICE PIZZA.
Set in 1973, in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, LICORICE PIZZA is the saga of Alana Kane and Gary Valentine and the evolution of their love story. It’s a rocky romance, a stormy relationship, in turns remarkably, ramshackingly real and impressively, immersively surreal.
Alana and Gary meet at his high school class photo session. She is an assistant to the photographer, quite a bit older than the super confident fifteen year old student and aspiring actor.
The opening scene is a long take of Gary chatting up Alana with a cheerful chutzpah. The long introductory shot has become somewhat of a trademark for Paul Thomas Anderson if you recall Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and Punch Drunk Love and it works a charm here, creating a real “what’s gong to happen next?” anticipation for these characters.
Well, what happens next is, Gary wrangles a gig for Alana as his chaperone when he is cast in a cheesy family show, an environment where another performer, closer her age, makes a move on her.
It looks like this lackadaisical love match is limpet mined but the pangs of possessiveness and jabs of jealousy are overcome by a fundamental friendship that prevails between the pair and the promise or potential that the relationship could develop into something more is part of the glorious tension of the film.
There’s plenty else going on to preoccupy audiences. Alana’s relationship with her family – father, mother and sisters- is a splendid sit com series in waiting. And Gary proves himself to be a pioneer of sorts, an entrepreneur in the brave new world of water beds and pin ball machines.
His foray into the newfangled slumber sack is one of the set piece high lights of the film. As a franchisee of Fat Bernie’s Water Bed Company, Gary and his crew install an aquatic cradle for the producer Jon Peters, played with pants man panache by Bradley Cooper.
Another star turn is delivered by Sean Penn playing an actor called Holden, a Hollywood golden boy who can’t quite differentiate between his real self and his status as a movie leading man.
Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman are a revelation as Alana and Gary, so real, making the unlikely feasible, their individual presence and their combined chemistry a truly joyous experience.
LICORICE PIZZA is intricate and precise and epic, full of incredible performances and an alchemic releasing of some essence of the past, the 1970s, something Paul Thomas Anderson has done before in BOOGIE NIGHTS.
Perfect crust, surprising topping, LICORICE PIZZA is the season’s tastiest treat. Amazing, audacious and unmissable.
Richard Cotter