It’s hard to imagine a movie more out of time—more detached from the present moment—than Licorice Pizza. To be sure, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson didn’t anticipate a global pandemic when he concocted this ’70s teenage nostalgia trip through the San Fernando Valley. But here we are, and even moviegoers desperately craving escapist entertainment at the height (or depth) of Omicron Season will be left unfulfilled by a film that offers cotton candy for the senses, and nothing more.
The pastel-hued, period-soundtracked Licorice Pizza (opening everywhere on Dec. 25) consists of a lengthy string of episodes involving a fast-talking child actor and inveterate hustler and the intelligent but aimless photographer’s assistant he espies and hits on at his high school photo day. Alana is a few years older than Gary, an impediment that would have fueled the plot of a romantic comedy of yore. But it makes little sense here, given that he serves as the movie’s motor while her presumed maturity and experience is rarely in evidence.
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Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who starred in Anderson’s The Master) and singer-songwriter Alana Haim achieve a naturalism in their acting debuts that dovetails with the director’s propensity for lengthy tracking shots and extended takes. Casting non-professionals serves another function, which is to contrast the characters’ innocence with the more calculated Hollywood types they eventually cross paths with.
The casting also suggests, improbably, as Quentin Tarantino did in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that any random Southern Californian might rub shoulders with a star. If Licorice Pizza has anything to say about American society or the American character, it’s that our real manifest destiny is the irrepressible urge to be rich and famous.
In Licorice Pizza, a famous older actor (Sean Penn playing an enjoyable riff on William Holden, in a lengthy, tongue-in-cheek sequence that features Tom Waits as a grizzled studio director) puts the moves on a receptive Alana in an industry watering hole. This scene seems to be the real reason that Alana needs to be of age, in order to (slightly) mitigate the creepiness of the encounter.