Despite decades of cinema celebrating its many streets and personalities, California hasn’t had an auteur who understands what it means to live here quite like Paul Thomas Anderson. Ever since Hard Eight (1996), he has been California Dreamin’, following the lust for life found in the eclectic mixing bowl best embodied in a Joan Didion book. He is someone who recognizes the heart and passion of these figures, putting themselves out there with a cardboard arrow pointing to their store. He loves them. His cinema gives them a timelessness, reflecting that not everyone comes here to become a movie star. Sometimes it’s a sense of freedom, requited or not, that has been romanticized by celluloid, in the collected works of John Steinbeck, or every glitzy tourist trap that continues to prey on the gullible (do we really need a wax museum?).
Collectively, his work reflects a modern California that is in its own way a wild west; a fantasy of what could be. This nostalgic heart feels most evident in his camerawork, where every long take isn’t pompous. He is more interested in lingering on a moment, allowing the wandering lens to admire the grand mix of real emotion and manufactured joy. To him, all of it is important. He wants to capture the feeling of being alive, of existing in this beachside haze that is unlike anything else. While he has done that impressively since Punch-Drunk Love (2002), the most amazing thing is that his dreams no longer exist in an abstract vision, but something more cohesive.
Licorice Pizza (2021) is, without a doubt, Anderson’s most meandering film. For the majority of the cast, their stories come and go like streetlights turning green. They exist only long enough to leave an impression, giving the director a chance to work with an incredible array of talent for the first time including Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, Benny Safdie, and more. For those expecting them to work like complementary blocks stacking to a greater purpose, that’s not the point. This isn’t a story that needs to exist by real-world logic. All that it needs is to buy into the logic of California Dreamin’, where billboards promise prosperous futures and everyone can start anew, finding different personas when the old one has worn out its use. Everyone attempts to matter but, even in the trajectory of protagonist Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), it’s clear that he is expendable, needing a second gig to make any money.
That’s the thing that needs to be understood. This is a story about dreamers, about those who still have that optimism to believe that California holds for them a wealth of options, a metaphorical 20th-century gold rush of sorts. Anderson’s camera has never felt less grounded, constantly wandering as Gary passes out flyers for his second start-up business (pinball arcade) with his friends wandering through traffic, dropping flyers on cars on their way to buy gas during an oil shortage. It is a free-spirit experience that is unlike anything Anderson has directed before. The streets feel alive, the neighborhoods with that familiar coat of weariness. This is the 70s that feel real, where the soundtrack is filled not with the hits but a more authentic array of tracks that build the mood. Even if California can be accused of being fake sometimes, Licorice Pizza lacks kitsch.
The film has an endless quality, never feeling like it exists on a rational timeline. One has to ask if Gary’s journey takes a week, a month, or even multiple years. How much time has passed since the first frame? Given everything that happens, whether it be getting on the ground floor of a waterbed company or running an election for a young up-and-coming mayor (Benny Safdie), it all feels like a scrapbook, vignettes attached by an old piece of tape that is barely holding on. These moments lack cohesion, and yet they all tell a unified story, one of the fellow dreamers trying to make it. From behind a desk, Gary watches a Japanese restaurant evolve from a pitch to a central hub for the rest of the story. In small ways, California feels expansive and in others, it feels small. Anderson perfectly conveys that feeling showing how fleeting the idea of living here actually can be.
This is best depicted in the opening scene, the first of many long takes emerging as Gary meets Alana (Alana Haim) for the first time. He is 15 and doing everything he can to impress this older woman. In most circumstances, dropping the line that he’s an actor with a long string of credits might seem impressive. To her, there’s some sense of skepticism, as if she has encountered dozens of Gary’s, so many dreamers. Is Valentine even his surname? Even for all of her protectiveness, she plays into her own sense of artificiality. She double-speaks, adding these layers of questions as to who is actually being authentic. Is anyone in the film capable of being honest, or will the casting agent constantly be looming large, needing them to keep up the charade?
It’s a mystery that isn’t played for any greater gain in the story. There is no big reveal. While Anderson allows the characters to embody something more authentic in their home lives, publicly they maintain the double-speak, the masking from parts of themselves that will keep them from getting work. Because it starts early and on the impressionable, wide-eyed protagonist, Anderson allows it to be more easily implied by everyone that follows. The audience is in awe of these random figures, but again… who is authentic? Even Jon Peters (Cooper) is questionable with his eccentric hairdo and need to brag that he dates Barbra Streisand. The idea of selling an image remains the heart of the film, and it’s what makes the central romance compelling.
On the one hand, Gary and Alana feel more platonic. Part of it is the age gap, but it’s also the sense that they are brought together more for business ventures, having been tossed from film and stage work to selling waterbeds until a vinyl shortage cuts their dreams short. Still, they work together, dreaming about the future that they could be like Peters or Jack Holden (Sean Penn): actors who have toured the world, made films so beloved that they can jump motorcycles behind bars to fervent audiences. Even if there’s an acknowledgment that this grandiose vision is fake, there’s still the dream of acquiring it, of basking in its potential glory.
At the same time, Anderson is commenting on something greater about the state. The story takes place during The Nixon Administration, a time fraught with war and uncertainty. The counterculture was growing bigger while New Hollywood overpowered cinemas. To be young was both exciting and confusing, and nobody is more that way than Gary, who seemingly changes his profession in 20 minute intervals. He has the confidence and gumption to survive, but he needs Alana as more than a friend. She is someone who reads The Los Angeles Times and can predict trends. She has foresight into the era that feels like more than Forrest Gump (1994) levels of coincidence. Not everything is convenient and sometimes plots are dropped for seemingly no reason, but again… they all feel intentional to the greater narrative.
Alana as a character is arguably the most interesting. Despite getting glimpses into her home life, the audience isn’t entirely sure who she is. Whereas with Gary who is seen performing kitschy musical numbers and trying out for commercials, Alana merely exists, moving from job to job with ease. The brief moments where she’s at home make her seem childish, yelling at her family (played by her Haim bandmates/sisters and parents) and immediately planning how to escape. The few moments of actual development include inviting an Atheist over for a Jewish ceremony, of which she storms out in anger when her date refuses to read scripture.
She is a figure who is desperately trying to make it but also feels suffocated by the world around her. Despite being older than Gary, Alana plays to his whim down to what she can and cannot do in a film. There is some subtext that she is more in need of holding onto that ambiguity in order to survive as a Jewish woman. It helps that Haim is giving a great performance as she smokes a cigarette on the side of a building, asking her friend why she hangs out with teenagers. Alana feels lame, even at times hopeless, but it’s not one leading to grand change. It’s just a chance to vent her reality, a few moments of frustration in a moment of greater potential.
With Licorice Pizza, Anderson captures a sense of eternal youth, of continually trying to reinvent oneself in order to survive. Almost every scene features somebody running, the background spinning like a Kodak camera wheel. In some ways the contrast of running against the crowd reflects how people enter and exit a scene, constantly existing only long enough to notice they were there. Even fun easter eggs like The Batmobile and Herman Munster get this treatment, making the world not about stopping to admire California’s greater culture, but to reflect how youth sometimes is so obsessed with blazing their own trail that things get taken for granted, ignored altogether.
Even for a film set a near 50 years in the past, this is a film that best exemplifies what it feels like to live in California even now. On the surface, many think of the film industry. They think of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) where everything is glamorous. They think of mob movies like To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). Rarely do they think of Southern California specifically as just a normal place, full of people living dreams that aren’t just acting. Licorice Pizza is a revelation in that way, allowing everything to coexist and create a bigger collage. It’s an impressive one that covers everything from economics to cinema to culture to politics to even romance. So much exists within the framework of this story that its already wondrous eye of nostalgia feels grander, full of purpose and deeper meaning. In its modesty and unwillingness to be about anything greater than the idea of survival, it creates one of the most perfect visions of a state that never really settled on an ideology.
If nothing else, it’s Anderson’s most impressive film since The Master (2012). In a career full of astounding achievements, Licorice Pizza is high on that list. What it lacks in a recognizable story it more than makes up for with a loving eye for its residents. Some of these people are real while others never existed. Still, they all feel authentic to the richer tapestry of California. Even if they lied their way through an audition or cut some corners to get a little extra grant money, they capture what it means to live here, day to day. The film is a fantasy, but not one of the studio systems. It’s one of believing that tomorrow will be better, that anything is possible. In a lot of respect, that’s true. This is the sweetest, kindest, at times most visually impressive film Anderson has made in a long time. California means a lot to him, and this may be the most heart on his sleeve love letter he’s ever produced. In all sincerity, thanks for the memories.
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