Review 630: Licorice Pizza

Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza is like a refreshing splash of cold water on hot summer's day, a sincere coming-of-age story that's also a sincere ode to 70's.

In California's San Fernando Valley in 1973, Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) is a precarious high schooler and child star who meets - and is immediately besotted with - Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a twenty - something photographer's assistant trying desperately to find herself. The two of them form an unlikely bond and soon begin running around the Valley together taking part in Gary's many haphazard schemes.

Primarily, Licorice Pizza is film that wonders what happens when two people who can't be together can't avoid being near each other. When Gary and Alana are not together, they're very unhappy.

Paul Thomas Anderson also puts a great emphasis on the San Fernando Valley setting making almost as much a character as Gary and Alana are. The film is a loveletter to that Valley, there are waterbeds, pinball machines. It has that nostalgia of George Lucas' American Graffiti but in a much more strange and edgy way.

Anderson structures the film as a series of vingnettes of Gary and Alana's misadventures across San Fernando Valley; Licorice Pizza meanders in the best possible ways. First you don't know where it's going and then you don't care where it's going because Anderson's direction and sense of pacing just lulls you along with its sense of adventure around every curb.

The cinematography is beautiful and captures the wild, vibrent and lovely atmosphere of San Fernando Valley in the 70s, the soundtrack (featuring hits from Bowie's Life on Mars to Nina Simone's July Tree) is excellent and helps to immerse us as an audience into the setting, the production design is terrific, (PTA's vision of California's San Fernando Valley is a dreamy, idyllic, simmering paradise full of possibility  the costumes are colourful, the score by Johnny Greenwood is 

Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim are delightfully charming in their roles; Gary Valentine is the most overly confident person you'll ever meet. Alana, on the other hand, is unstable in her life whereas Gary is gounded and self-motivated but he's a teenager who is leading this half-man, half-boy existence. Gary is a former child and he's an entrepreneur with loads of things going on. The two of them compliment each other superbly and form the best kind of friendship. They capture the madness of being a teenager and a twenty something. There are these years between them They are two people on a journey together. Both of them are misfits.

The film also features some very showy supporting work from both Sean Penn and Bradley Cooper playing Jack Holden and Jon Peters respectively. Cooper in particular is having a blast playing an exagerated version of the notorious film producer.

5/5.

The Anonymous Critic.