For a 15-year-old child star in California‘s San Fernando Valley, Hollywood is at least as far away as the adult world. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to ignore this discrepancy. Probably only young people who like to play adults can maneuver through puberty with such a matter of course as the teenager Gary Valentine.
Gary (Cooper Hoffman) has been on a family sitcom since he was a kid. His mother takes over his agent’s duties, and he’s greeted effusively by name at the posh restaurant in the backwaters of Los Angeles. But then in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s 1970s fantasy “Licorice Pizza“, named after a record store, there is also a lot of walking, because Los Angeles was built for cars – and as a self-declared child star without a driver’s license you don’t get any extra sausage. But one thing Gary Valentine knows, by the way not a stage name, right from the start. “Today I met the woman I am going to marry!”
Alana, played by Alana Haim, the youngest sister of the Californian soft rock band Haim (who, with their retro sound somewhere between Stevie Nicks, Belinda Carlisle and Bonnie Raitt, represent a sympathetic seventies fantasy in the pop business), can only dream of this naturalness. She struggles through life with a odd job, searches for a deeper meaning and still lives with her parents with her younger siblings Este and Danielle – all played by the real Haim family. The latter poses a problem as Alana is already 25. Not for Gary, however, who chatted up her in the schoolyard where she worked as a photo assistant for the year’s photo – and from then on never left her side.
This first encounter, a lengthy plan sequence in which Gary fawns over Alana as she energetically marches across the schoolyard, becomes a sort of pattern for “Licorice Pizza,” which rarely stops for nearly two and a half hours. The movements of the film do not always point in one direction: sometimes the plot turns in circles – like the comical friendship between Alana and the 15-year-old giant baby with his glowing acne -, it meanders or falls into a hypnotic flow in which the Time seems to be suspended briefly.
Car filmmaker with an ingenious reputation
Former Hollywood prodigy Paul Thomas Anderson, now an auteur filmmaker who has the reputation of being a little genius, has already made a few music videos for the band Haim in which the three sisters walk a lot – a trademark that one associates with as a native of Los Angelinas is quite out of character. In “Licorice Pizza”, the narrative form of tracking shots (led by Anderson himself) fulfills two things: the restlessness of an age when the world is supposedly still open to you (Gary) and the worry that you have to get somewhere (Alana).
Gary is a hustler. A charismatic entrepreneur who, when a growth spurt knocks him out of his child star career almost overnight, starts a waterbed business. And who later, when the oil crisis of 1973 affected the supply of raw materials for plastic, simply switched to pinball machines.
Aimless Alana watches this jack of all trades in his adult suit and more than once wonders why she spends her time with a bunch of pubescent kids. The fact that such thoughts never come to mind while watching is due to the chemistry between Haim and Hoffman, the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in 2014 (again a friend and companion of the director). Their naturalism, both in their debut roles, also makes up for some of the script irritations.
Vain cameos by Sean Penn and Tom Waits
The effortless acting of his young stars is repeatedly undermined by Anderson himself with noisy, vain cameos from Sean Penn, Tom Waits and Bradley Cooper (as a fictionalized version of former celebrity hairdresser and later producer Jon Peters), which arguably the affiliation of the brilliant director, extremely successful on the fringes Hollywoods, to a caste of like-minded mavericks.
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His previous leading actors Joaquin Phoenix (“The Master”) and Daniel Day-Lewis (“There Will Be Blood”) fell into this category of idiosyncratic stars. Anderson wants to fit in while proving his independence from industry mechanisms. A small film like “Licorice Pizza” would not have needed such exaggerated gestures.
(In 15 Berlin cinemas, also OV/OmU)
Sometimes nostalgia turns out to be bad advice – a cardinal error that is widespread, especially among directors (even Richard Linklater, who “Licorice Pizza” is most reminiscent of). Anderson’s timeline ironically plays with the tone of the 1970s – the sexism (Alana’s boss slaps her ass as she walks by), the latent racism (there are a few seldom stupid jokes about Asians). But the film can’t manage more than a knowing laugh at the end. One could dismiss it as a design flaw of male nostalgia if at least the characters pointed beyond this stage of consciousness.
But Anderson is particularly interested in the busy Gary, who is already knitting his legend as a teenager. True, Alana Haim can roll her eyes in the most memorable way; For a long time she seems not only to be the one with the driver’s license, but also to sit behind the steering wheel in this friendship. But her search for meaning always comes to nothing, while Gary’s craziest idea is celebrated like a stroke of young genius.
In many scenes, Alana is above all allowed to look good – and finally, annoyed, even gives in to Gary’s wish to show her breasts to the horny teenager (away from the camera). Alana Haim owns the biggest moment of the film. She drives a furniture truck on a nighttime getaway down the hills of Los Angeles, backwards, out of gas. The action scene of the year is as quiet as a mouse.
