Language: English
It’s love at first sight in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, when Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) sees Alana Kane (Alana Haim) in a school corridor. She’s offering a comb and mirror to students before they get their picture taken for the school yearbook. Gary is almost instantly smitten by her, while she simply rebuffs his ‘interest’ with amusement and condescension. He is 15, she is 25. He asks her out to dinner, and the more persistent he is the more curious she becomes. “Who is this kid? Where does he get his confidence from?” she’s probably thinking. That very day, Gary tells his little brother that he’s met the girl he is about to marry.
As audience members, we’re already feeling bad for Gary, because most of us seem to know something he doesn’t – how many teenage love stories get crushed under the wheel of real-world pragmatism. And yet Gary is not your average teen, as we soon find out. He’s a child actor, who has worked in a famous sitcom from the ‘70s. He’s a part-time copywriter for his mother’s PR company. His mind keeps wandering off to ‘problems’ he can solve with his entrepreneurial skills. He employs his little brother and friends, leading a gang of astute businessmen (but actually ‘boys’). When Alana hears about this, she thinks he is pulling her leg.
Alana is impressed by Gary’s cocksure ignorance, but she chooses to date his older co-star in the sitcom, Lance (Skyler Gisondo). Still living with her parents and her two elder sisters (all played by the real Haim family), Alana is impatiently looking for a ticket out of the house. After her relationship with Lance fails, she partners up with Gary on more than one of his ventures. Haim, who is a real-life musician, is almost a natural in the way she channels the confusion of her fictional counterpart. Especially, in a scene where Gary keeps telling her to ‘make it sexier’ during a sales phone call to a reluctant male customer.
Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman – who was one of Anderson’s most frequent collaborators, sports floppy hair like his father. He even has a ‘bit of a belly’ like most of Hoffman senior’s characters, almost as if Anderson was trying to mould the son into his late father’s teenage years. He even has a couple of his father’s mannerisms pat down, like when he’s in the house of Jon Peters (a diligently insane cameo by Bradley Cooper) and there’s a glint of mischief in his eyes before cracking a smile, it’s as if Hoffman and Anderson are winking at the audience.
Gary and Alana’s relationship isn’t your straightforward romance, as we’ve come to expect from Hollywood fare. We see them become friends, even probably flirt with each other, and then we hear her introducing herself as his ‘business partner’. They keep clarifying to everyone that they’re not together, and yet each time they’re out with someone else, they seem to be making an extra effort to keep an eye on each other, almost relishing the other person’s envy.. There’s definitely something between the two of them, but it can’t be real right? He’s just a kid. And she (well into her 20s) seems to be going around in circles, without a career or even a goal.
Having made a series of films on dysfunctional oil barons, traumatised veterans and obsessive designers, Licorice Pizza finds Anderson letting his hair down. However, he’s still curious about the human condition.
In this case, he doesn’t merely gloss over youth as a ‘gift wasted on the young’, instead he embraces youth with all its messiness - the jealousy, the immaturity, the silliness, the pride and the fearlessness. Anderson chases that feeling of freedom that we felt while we were young, probably hinting at why running is a recurring motif here. When was the last time you ran: absolutely unhindered, singularly focused, not deterred by anything in the world?
Rating: * * * *
Licorice Pizza is playing in select Indian theatres from Feb 25, 2022
Tatsam Mukherjee has been working as a film journalist since 2016. He is based out of Delhi NCR.
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