- Fifteen-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) doesn’t think about studying. He wants to succeed at any cost. One day the ambitious teenager meets photographer Alana Kane (Alana Haim), who is ten years older than him. Despite the age difference, feelings flare up between them. However, Gary and Alana cannot admit to them. Their relationship escalates into rivalry, jealousy, and resentment. But their thirst for adventurous adventure keeps them attached to each other and prevents them from parting.
“Licorice Pizza” is the ninth film by living classic of American cinema, Paul Thomas Anderson. The seemingly nostalgic love story under the sunny skies of the 1970s bears little resemblance to anything the director has done before. But love in all its extraordinary manifestations – knocking down, breaking stereotypes and conventions, bringing the most distant poles together – is perhaps the main theme of his work. And the worst punishment for the characters in Anderson’s films is the inability to love.
In “Licorice Pizza,” everything is filled with the light of love and youth. The picture catches in the air a sense of first feelings that seem so easy to scare off and banish forever. Gary and Alana fall in love at first sight, but they can’t let it go, believe themselves. After all, there is so much to do, you have to strive for success, have time to become someone in this life.
And Gary rushes from one adventure to another. That he jumps in children’s pajamas in movie extras, hoping to become famous, then he decides to sell water mattresses or open an arcade. Alana, noticing the entrepreneurial spirit in him, helps the little rascal. Although she herself dreams of a career in modeling, or politics, or simply to marry well.
Along the way, Gary and Alan meet adults who have become famous: alcoholic actor John Holden (Sean Penn) and eccentric director Rex Blau (Tom Waits), Barbra Streisand’s crazy lover John Peters (Bradley Cooper) and politician Joel Vaught (Ben Safdie), who is running for mayor. All of them have at some point given up on love, betraying themselves for wealth, vanity, or some “higher purpose.” Anderson demonstrates this distinction between the world of teenagers, ready to move mountains for their dreams, and adults whose dreams seem to have come true, but at the cost of many losses. The choices that the heroes of “La La Land” or “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” make are unacceptable for Anderson. Let all the dreams and aspirations of success and career destroyed, but – “do not part with the loved ones.
And in this simple-hearted idealism, the beauty of the gesture hides the poetry and lyricism of “Licorice Pizza.” Anderson has made a movie in which nothing really happens except little comedic sketches, talking about everything and nothing. But every scene in the picture is full of extraordinary expressiveness, in which not so much the breath of the era (which is certainly evident in all the details) as the sense of fullness of life conveyed by the acting duo of young debutants Cooper Hoffman (son of Anderson’s favorite actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in 2014) and Alana Haim. The actors are so natural in their characters, completely merging with their characters, and it’s not always clear whether it’s rehearsed or born on the fly.
The story of this most ordinary but grandiose love was not meant to take place today, but in the past, in the midst of reckless Hollywood stars and David Bowie’s songs about the cosmos. In a time when people seemed capable of genuine feelings, of great deeds in an evil and absurd world. But “Licorice Pizza” does not leave the viewer alone with longing and nostalgia. On the contrary, one wants to drop everything and do some romantic foolishness–even fall in love at first sight. Anderson assures us that as long as one is capable of it, all is not lost in life.