Paul Thomas Anderson has a new movie out which is the best news. I do not think any director working in the English language is as constantly interesting as he.
From Boogie Nights to The Phantom Thread to Punch Drunk Love, everything he has made since he came onto the scene in the late 1990s has been at least well worth seeing and he has been getting better with every film.
The film stars newcomer Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman ) and Alana Haim, of the band Haim. Neither have acted before but both are just perfect as a young couple, Gary and Alana, falling in and out of love with each other. There really isn’t much more to the movie than that. Set in the San Fernando Valley in the midst of the 1979 oil crisis it plays with nostalgia, but not in a pandering way.
The movie does not really have a guiding narrative other than the growing relationship between the two leads ). One moment Gary is an actor, then he is selling waterbeds, and opening a pinball arcade.
The situations and dilemmas the characters get into are entirely preposterous and completely unbelievable when written down which might be an issue for some people looking for a more traditionally told story. I have no issue with that because of the complete control Anderson has over his movie.
He introduces an entirely new character (played by a well known actor ) and a huge new plot point in the last 25 minutes. In the hands of a lesser director you might think, ‘What is he doing? The film is nearly over?’ But Licorice Pizza is a mosaic, showing you different experiences and moments in time of our two protagonists. We are seeing what shapes them and what brings them together and pulls them apart.
This is what is called a ‘hang out movie’ like Dazed and Confused or Frances Ha. The audience is not supposed to worry about where it is going or how it will get there. This is just about spending time with these characters.
Licorice Pizza recalls Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, but at the end of that movie Tarantino gives us the pay off with his reimagination of the Manson murders essentially as an action set piece. Here there is no such pay off (although a scene with a reversing truck is brutally tense ).
Licorice Pizza is exactly what we do not see enough off in Hollywood cinema anymore - a movie without a huge point, but that is OK. In a world of superhero movies, sequels, and reboots this is unique. At its heart is a love story, a surprisingly chaste one, but a love story all the same, and with the current state of the world, and January being the worst month, it is exactly what I needed right now.
