Licorice Pizza debuts in theaters on Nov. 26, 2021.
Licorice Pizza kind of warns you in the title that, depending on your taste, there’s a good chance some of what’s being served isn’t going to go down easily. Despite the sunny one-sheets and the era’s authentic, up-tempo needle drops, the film is in alignment with Paul Thomas Anderson’s oeuvre of telling the stories of deeply troubled people. Some of it works, but other parts will likely leave you with a strange aftertaste.
Many aren’t going to agree with me, but the very premise of the “romance” at the heart of this film between 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim) isn’t cute, sweet, or charming. It’s one, wrong and two, extremely dysfunctional for this pair living in the Hollywood-adjacent San Fernando Valley. They meet at Gary’s high school on picture day, when he’s in line and she’s assisting the handsy photog. They’re immediately curious about one another as they banter and flirt, and then Gary pursues. Yet through it all, Anderson lays the groundwork for how these two connect on a maturity level that hasn’t graduated from basic recess yard impulses.
Gary, as played by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper Hoffman, is a successful child actor, who has wielded his limited “fame” with confidence far beyond his years. He’s got a lot of alpha energy for such a sprite, which we see is from having to navigate the egos of aging Hollywood stars and a revolving door of casting agents. It’s in this space that he declares to his younger brother, on the same day as meeting her, that he’s going to marry Alana someday. Again, what might be romantic to some is more than creepy to another.
Alana is the youngest daughter of a restrictive ex-Israeli soldier, spinning her wheels personally and professionally. There’s a seething anger just below the surface of all her interactions, impatient with her lot in life and the straight paths she’s uninterested in taking to achieve her goals of wealth and attention. Gary is the road not taken, the one that she knows she shouldn’t pursue. It’s one she flagrantly does, but puts her toe in, and then takes out, like an unending game of hokey pokey for the entire length of the movie.
As the two aggressively flirt and make one another jealous, Gary envelops Alana into his scattershot existence, first as his adult chaperone on his press tour trip to New York City, and then in a series of opportunistic business ventures in the Valley. Be it ahead of the trend — waterbeds, acting gigs, pinball houses, you name it — when Gary puts his eye on it, he’s immediately successful at it. Their seemingly random ventures (which are all based on the real exploits of former child actor Gary Goetzman) carry Gary, Alana, and a small posse of young enablers across a summer in the Valley running breathlessly from one scheme to the next.
In all the crisscrossing, Anderson does capture the time, 1973, with incredible accuracy. Anderson and co-DP Michael Bauman create a landscape that subsumes the cast and location into that time with almost documentarian precision. Faces are shot au natural and close up so every imperfection is captured, bringing a sense of realism to the fore. All of that helps with the almost fever dream escapades that are presented along the way. From Sean Penn and Tom Waits’ aging Hollywood alpha males setting up impromptu motorcycle jumps on a golf course to a surreal evening with Bradley Cooper’s over-sexed Jon Peter’s buying a waterbed, there’s nothing mundane about what Gary and Alana experience together.
But it all gets to be too much about halfway through. What Anderson doesn’t give us is the inner lives of anyone in the film. Gary and Alana are entirely front-facing people, ruled by their mercurial natures and strange, almost magnetic attraction to one another. They tease and bait one another, hurt and then almost ferally defend one another. While Alana does, at a couple points, vocally question the weirdness of her spending so much time with a boy like Gary, the movie isn’t interested in seeing either of them grow. In fact, Anderson seems most interested in just watching them attract and repel one another ad nauseum as they navigate themselves amongst a never-ending lineup of awful men and agency-less women.
Regardless of where Gary and Alana end up in the movie, the biggest barrier to entry in Licorice Pizza is the inherent wrongness of these two being together because of their ages. You can love the performances of Hoffman and Haim, who are both very good, and enjoy their escapades, even if they go on about 40 minutes too long. But you can also reject the extremely bent moral compass the movie mostly ignores. If the genders were turned, there would be no question of how problematic this premise is. But maybe Anderson, in the end, is really provoking our morals. Maybe the broken, cynical playground that serves as the backdrop to their adventures is the canary in the coalmine for this whole seemingly “romantic” venture. I’d like to believe that’s Anderson's true intention, getting us to really think about how easily we’re persuaded to root for a messed-up dynamic because it’s so skillfully framed like a Hollywood ending. And if he’s not, there’s not enough “no thank you’s” in the world to be given to this slice of life.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3HSaZ8Y
This could be a real lead forward for personal gaming... Revolutionise gaming
No comments:
Post a Comment