Licorice Pizza
There is a unique quality to the way Paul Thomas Anderson builds characters who inhabit his cinematic universe. Even when you feel like you’ve finally understood his characters, whether it be Barry Egan, Daniel Plainview, Freddie Quell or Reynolds Woodcock, there’s always an uncomfortableness that lurks beneath the surface, as if you’re anticipating something bad happening or a sudden shift in mood. It is undoubtedly one of the finest traits of Anderson’s writing, yet in his latest outing, Licorice Pizza, this has been pushed to the periphery in favour of a lightweight and surface-level work.
Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) is a 15 going on 30, and even though he’s still in high school, he’s also an actor and runs a communications agency with his mother. On school photo day, he encounters Alana Kane (Alana Haim) who says she’s 25 — yet she could be any age. Gary believes Alana is the one for him and he continues to pester her to go on a date with him with the will they or won’t they forming the basis of Pizza.
Throughout it’s 135 minute runtime, Pizza goes down many story strands which include waterbeds, a closeted mayoral candidate, an arrest for murder, a batshit crazy appearance by Bradley Cooper as a fictionalised Jon Peters, and a character based on William Holden. With this ability to meander and not be firmly plotted, comparisons have been made with Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both hark back to yesteryear California and ooze in nostalgia, yet where Hollywood builds tension over the Manson family and Sharon Tate’s death, Pizza fails to build any tension whatsoever — except for the Jon Peters’s appearance and the truck scene, which becomes the only memorable part of an otherwise forgettable experience.
What is even more frustrating is that this had all the hallmarks of a great PTA film, from the West Coast setting to the long tracking shots and beautiful cinematography. However, if you compare Pizza to the two PTA films which it shares similarities, 1997’s Boogie Nights and 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, both fused lighter moments with a darker veneer under the surface. Pizza only does the former and with it becomes a lightweight and forgettable work, which is merely background noise.
After the magnitude of There Will Be Blood, the acting masterclass of The Master, the audacity to adapt Pynchon with Inherent Vice, and the intense beauty of Phantom Thread, Pizza is unable to compete and will inevitably be placed at the weaker end of Anderson’s filmography.
The pizza doesn’t taste bad but it sure is bland.
