Paul Thomas Anderson is to the San Fernando Valley what Woody Allen is to Manhattan.
Sure, Quentin Tarantino grew up here. Chinatown is here. And Hollywood has one address.
But Anderson represents the sprawling heart of the Valley. Half Stanley Kubrick, half strip shopping mall, Anderson is the avatar for the 21st Century California filmmaker. And ‘Licorice Pizza’ the 21st Century California movie, tye-dyed in nostalgia for an era that may or may not have existed. But its appeal undeniably did.
In a way, ‘Pizza’ is the embodiment of nostalgia without sentiment, capturing a time and place in the 1970s when Nixon was on TV, Vin Scully called Dodger games on radio, gas lines formed because of shortages, and a boss could brazenly slap the behind of his female employee without fear of repercussions.
At its core, the movie is a peculiar love story, one involving Gary (Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), who’s about to turn 16, and the older Alana (Alana Haim, of the rock band), who finds direction in an otherwise unfocused life thanks to Gary’s get-rich-quick schemes, which include peddling water beds.
A few actual ’70s characters find their way into the pair’s Hollywood-heavy plot, with Bradley Cooper portraying producer Jon Peters as a wildly flamboyant lunatic who actually purchases one of the beds. Sean Penn also turns up as an actor (the name is changed, but only slightly) full of strange stories, although it’s not entirely clear that he can separate reality from his movies.
‘Licorice Pizza’ really doesn’t have much of a plot; instead its a ‘Dazed and Confused’ style series of loosely connected episodes, in a way that becomes more obvious during the second half. Nor does it really address some of the nagging questions about Alana, whose periodic tantrums are among the film’s only poorly written scenes.
Those disclaimers aside, for the most part Anderson (who has directed a number of Haim videos since his last film, “Phantom Thread”) has delivered another highly entertaining movie, capturing a very particular time but also the enduring and universal nature of relationships developing in the most unexpected ways.
The title, incidentally, comes from a chain of record stores that were popular in the ’70s but no longer exist — a fitting symbol of the desire to give this bygone era another spin.
Anderson, the director of ‘Boogie Nights’ and ‘There Will Be Blood,’ has made perhaps his most sentimental film yet. More importantly, ‘Licorice Pizza’ is a movie Hollywood desperately sought mid-pandemic: one with heart.
