Licorice Pizza

 During the first third of Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza (2021), the movie's hero, Gary Valentine, an out-of-work child actor, monetizes his status as a former TV sit-com star by attending a "Teen" Convention.  Gary has started a water-bed business (the film takes place around 1973) and plans to peddle his wares at the show.  He enlists his little brother to buy weed and intends to encourage prospective purchasers to smoke a little dope as a sales incentive.  Suddenly, the cops swoop down on him, pin Gary against the squad car, and manhandle him to the station, cursing at him and saying that he is a murderer.  Gary is chained to a bench at the station.  Gary's erstwhile business partner, Alaina, sees the bust -- she's in love with Gary but much too proud and intelligent to succumb to his smarmy charms.  At each juncture in the film, up to its very end, she steadfastly resists Gary's efforts to make her his girlfriend.  Alaina is horrified that Gary has been violently arrested and she runs (the camera tracking her from right to left) at breakneck speed to the police station.  Panting, she stops on the sidewalk and sees Gary inside, handcuffed to the metal bench.  A few moments later, the cops drag in a scum-bag witness who says that Gary "isn't the guy" and, so, without explanation and without apology the police just let him go.  The viewer expects the scene to form part of the narrative, but it doesn't lead to anything -- there's no cause and effect with regard to the arrest; it doesn't teach Gary a lesson (he is incorrigible) and it doesn't advance Alaina's understanding of the hero.  After the sequence ends, it's never referenced again.  The movie sets up a strategy of misdirection -- we think the bust has something to do with Gary sending his nine-year old brother out to buy marijuana, but this isn't related at all.  So the question arises:  what is the scene for?

About an hour later, Alaina is angry at Gary and, so, as is her custom in the film, she flirts with other men to make him angry.  (Gary is excessively jealous and possessive).  Alaina goes to a supper-club called "Tail o' the Cock" where she drinks with an aging movie star named Jack Holden (Sean Penn).  Holden is more interested in booze than the young woman, but his old matinee idol instincts cause him to reflexively make a pass at her.  He quotes lines to her from a war movie, The Bridges at Toko-San  and she asks:  "Are these just lines or is this real?"  Jack doesn't answer because he probably doesn't know the answer.  Jack's half-hearted attempt to seduce Alaina ends when an old crony suggests that he jump a motorcycle over a bonfire built on the eighth tee of a nearby golf course.  Alaina agrees to ride with Jack during this quixotic venture -- the viewer feels a strong dread about the drunken Jack's ability to successfully launch the motorcycle over the roaring fire.  Jack drives off a couple hundred yards with Alaina on the back of the motorcycle (she has a folk singer's guitar strapped over her shoulder).  When Jack guns the motorcycle, Alaina falls off backward and is stunned.  Gary, who has come to the "Cock" to search for her, sees Alaina fall and he runs full-tilt across the golf course to rescue her.  The camera tracks his sprint as he runs from left to right.  Jack's motorcycle going the opposite direction roars by and he successfully makes the jump.  Alaina turns out to be okay.  What is this scene about?  First, the sequence featuring washed-up and aging movie stars reflects, to some extent, Gary's plight -- at age 15, he's already a "has-been."  The drunken crony, played by Tom Waits, channels Edmond O'Brien, particularly as he appears in Orson Welles The Other Side of the Wind, that is, the alcoholic sycophant to an equally alcoholic movie star.  The reckless stunt shows us that these old macho movie stars in their alcoholic stupor can't really distinguish their exploits on-film from their lives on-screen.  But the scene, like the episode of the arrest, goes nowhere -- it causes nothing and is not an effect of anything that we've seen.  The sequence doesn't lead to any decisive conflict -- there's no overt conflict in the movie.  And the scene doesn't signify character development -- no one comes to any recognitions in this film, no one shows much in the way of insight, and no one "develops" (in this way, the film is scrupulously true to life).  The scene exists for one predominant reason -- it gives Anderson an opportunity to show Gary running as fast as he can with the camera tracking on him.

Gradually, the alert viewer comes to the conclusion that Licorice Pizza is primarily contrived to set up shots of the two principals, Alaina and Gary, running across the screen, held in half-focus by a tracking or panning hand-held camera.  Shots of this sort occur about every ten minutes.  Indeed, there are so many shots of this type that Anderson pieces a montage together at the end of the movie, reprising the various sprints he has imposed upon his two, thwarted lovers.  At the end of the film, Gary runs toward Alaina and Alaina runs toward Gary -- this is a standard film trope (there's a noteworthy example in The Graduate).  At last, the two characters are simultaneously running toward one another.  They collide in front of a movie theater showing Charles Bronson's The Mechanic and the James Bond movie, Live and Let Die.  The force of the impact between them hurls both to the ground much to the bemusement of the ticket-seller in her booth.  At last, the two characters have intersected in their passion for one another.  But, characteristically, the sequence goes nowhere -- Anderson plots a non-plot, that is, an anti-climax.  Gary takes Alaina to his pinball arcade and announces to everyone that she is now "Mrs. Gary Valentine" (or, maybe, "Alaina Valentine" -- it would make a difference and I can't remember how this is done).  Alaina is outraged at his audacity and mutters to him "Idiot!"  And, on this note, the film ends.  Anderson's theme is that things don't get resolved in real life, loose ends in the narrative aren't tied up, no one learns from their mistakes or experiences, everyone just blunders along trapped within their own egotism -- the improbable romance between Gary and Alaina will never be a Hollywood romance and so can't have a Hollywood happy ending.  Things will just continue as they have during the film, until one party or the other or both are too exhausted to continue.  Anderson's two hour and fifteen minute non-narrative is a wee bit dull and trying to the audience's patience, particularly since the director sets up mini-plots that seem poised to have meaning but that go nowhere, but the picture, in its rambling formless way is realistic, a slice of genuine life, and the characters, although petty and deceitful, are charming -- a little like the people in Seinfeld.  Anderson's commitment to realism is so strong that his two protagonists don't look like movie stars and, although they have strong presences on screen, aren't even particularly pretty -- Gary inclines toward chubbiness and his a spray of pimples on his lower jaw; Alaina has squinty eyes and a hooked Semitic nose -- in one scene, a talent agent remarks again and again on her "Jewish nose".  These physical defects are evident and, even, emphasized --about half of the film is shot in extreme close-up.  Anderson is interested in the performances that he gets from his actors and, so, the camera scrutinizes them at very close range -- the camera work is uncomfortably intimate.  For instance, in the scene involving the middle-aged female talent agent, the camera is poised about six inches from her face, searching her enormous features for any sign of spite or malice, particularly when she repeated mentions Alaina's nose -- as in real life, people's faces aren't mirrors of their soul; they are more like masks and the huge close-ups register little flickers of emotion but, generally, these faces are inscrutable, even unknowable.  

Paul Thomas Anderson's films are hard to characterize.  What exactly was Magnolia about?  What was theme of The Master or, for that matter, There Will Be Blood --  amovie critics like to pretend that they understand this latter film but they don't.  In his first feature, Hard Eight, the film's tone is impossible to define and it belongs to either no known genre or all genres -- it is crime picture? a semi-documentary about gambling in Vegas (based, in some ways, on Altman's California Split), is it a coming of age picture, a romance, or a homage to the morose character actor Philip Baker Hall?  The film is all of these things and none of them at the same time.  Similarly, it 's impossible to find a category that fits Licorice Pizza -- is it a love story in which the two lovers don't kiss, don't have sex, and never embrace?  Is it a satire about Hollywood in the Seventies (there's a lot of inside dope in the movie that I don't pretend to understand) or is it a study of American hucksters and scam artists?  Or, is the film just an machine to motivate shots of young people running?  The film's formal qualities, which are precise and maddeningly repetitive, are the only real structure that the picture has -- otherwise, Licorice Pizza has all the merits and flaws of a film that is, more or less, formless (even intentionally feckless) with respect to narrative.  

Licorice Pizza starts with Gary Valentine, a formerly well-known (if not exactly famous) child actor, chatting up Alaina.  Alaina is 25 (or, maybe, even 28 -- she admits this once in the film) and working for a school-portrait photography business called "Tiny Toes."  Gary is fifteen and, so, from the outset, it's clear that a relationship between them, although probably plausible by the mores prevailing in 1971, would be  impossible today.  And, indeed, the relationship isn't plausible in any event.  Gary is a shameless self-promoter but pretty much inept and helpless -- for most of the movie, he can't drive and has to be chauffeured around by Alaina.  Alaina is very self-confident, capable, and level-headed.  It's an example of opposites attracting -- "Licorice Pizza", I assume:  that is, ingredients that are wonderful in themselves but that should never be combined.  (Most people, I've noticed, have an instinctive revulsion to the title -- and, for this reason, I'm sure the movie will have little or no box-office.)  The clash of opposite personality types powers the film and establishes a fundamental, insoluble conflict.  Furthermore, the age discrepancy prevents Anderson from showing a physical encounters between his protagonists, a limitation that the director uses the way Shakespeare uses the strait-jacket of the sonnet form -- it's an incentive to creativity.  Gary is known to all the restauranteurs in Encino -- the hosts at all the swank restaurants in town know him by his first name.  (Apparently, as a child star, he was a much sought-after patron and people still, as if by habit, treat him with weird respect -- this is curious because he's really just a pimple-faced teenager. )  Gary talks Alaina into meeting him for a date at the Tail of the Cock supper club and, although she refuses to be his "girlfriend", she's willing to work with him as a "business partner".  She travels with Gary as his chaperone to a New York filming of a reunion show with the cast of Under the Same Roof, apparently, a sit-com in which Gary starred when he was younger.  He reads for a couple parts but his agent (Maya Rudolph) is obviously appalled that he's now a burly adolescent and she has no roles for him -- she has him read copy for an acne cream.  Alaina, as is the pattern in the film, flirts with Gary's co-star on the show and, perhaps, even has an affair with him -- the romance ends at a family Passover meal in which the young man (who is Jewish himself) announces to her pious family that he is an atheist.  Meanwhile Gary has started a water-bed business.  This enterprise is successful until the oil embargo makes vinyl too expensive and the business collapses.  The center of the film is aimless -- the oil embargo results in people always running out of gas.  Gary sells a water-bed to a big Hollywood mover-and-shaker who is a loud-mouth, claiming to bond with Gary over the "way of the streets".  He threatens Gary's little brother, saying he'll strangle him in front of Gary if anything goes wrong with the water bed.  The creepy Hollywood producer jets off in his Porsche (he has a date with Barbra Streisand) but runs out of gas.  Gary, outraged by the man's belligerence, flood his house and, then, with Alaina driving a big moving van, beats a hasty retreat.  But the big truck runs out of gas and Alaina has to steer the vehicle down a steep winding mountain road, driving backward no less.  (This sequence is an example of how Anderson can contrive a bravura action sequence with real menace and suspense, but, then, directs the scene end in anti-climax.  The evil producer in his white jumpsuit appears and we expect him to take revenge on Gary and Alaina, but he's a pussy-hound and gets distracted by two girls walking by on the sidewalk at dawn in their tennis togs -- so he wanders off  in their pursuit and the scene ends.  Disgusted with Gary, Alaina joins the campaign of a handsome young politician running for city council.  The politician seems interested in Alaina and even summons her to an expensive restaurant where we expect that he is going to suggest a relationship.  But it turns out that he's gay and is using her as a "beard" so that she can depart the restaurant with his spurned boyfriend.  In front of the boyfriend's apartment, Alaina and the man commiserate about the fact that they are attracted to "shits."  Gary has learned that the councilman has the votes to repeal an ordinance banning pinball arcades.  And, so, he hustles to set up a pinball emporium which is wildly successful.  This sets up the final scene in which the two characters run toward one another, Alaina upset at being rejected by the politician and Gary jealous that she (seems) to be having an affair with councilman.  

Anderson toys with the audience in several ways.  First, he casts actors who look familiar but can't be exactly who they seem to be.  George di Caprio appears instead of his more famous sib Leonardo.  Gary is played by Matthew Hoffman, the son of the famous Philip Seymour Hoffman who made several noteworthy films with Anderson -- he's in Anderson's first picture Hard Eight and was the star in The Master, the director's film about Scientology.  Tim Conway Jr. is in the movie as is Bernie Safdie, the film-maker, along with Tom Waits and Sean Penn (although these roles are more cameos).  Anderson sets up sequences that seem about to explode into violence, but this never actually happens.  The scenes involving the psychotically aggressive Hollywood producer refers to Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, particularly the moment in the movie when the gangster-movie producer smashes a coke bottle on his girlfriend's face ("I would do such a thing to her and I actually loved that girl," the gangster says plaintively; Bradley Cooper plays the part with aplomb and has real menace, but he's too horny to follow-up on his revenge.  At the end of the movie, there's a sinister nerd stalking the politician -- this guy is shot like Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver and we are led to expect that he will assassinate the city councilman.  Indeed, we see him lurking at the restaurant where Alaina is asked to act as a "beard" with the politician's boyfriend.  (Most probably, he's a pick-up who is waiting to leave the place with the politician although the whole set-up is menacing.)  These effects are intended to disorient the viewer and keep us interested, although there's never any conventional pay-off.

Licorice Pizza is full of bizarre bits of business -- there's a restaurant-operator who exploits his none-to-meek Japanese wife; the man bellows at her in pidgen-English with a dubbed samurai accent; she speaks in Japanese which he doesn't understand.  I assume that that there's lots of "inside baseball" here -- that is, characters are playing versions of Hollywood personalities and, probably, some of the scenes are based on movie industry gossip.  The movie's huge close-ups, intended to be inexpressive, give the film a claustrophobic feeling and, truth to tell, its more than a little bit dull -- parts of the movie drag and droop.  But Anderson is an important film-maker and the movie is fascinating, in fact, more interesting to describe and ponder than to watch.  At the screening that I attended, the audience (about eight people, all of them elderly -- kids don't go to movies any more) was obviously baffled.     

("Licorice Pizza" refers to a record shop -- LP, get it?  A "licorice pizza" is made with black sesame seeds. "The Mikado" restaurant referred to in the movie was a real place, operated by Jerry Frick -- the name is used in the movie.  "Tail o' the Cock" was a restaurant (in fact, there were two) on Ventura Boulevard and, also, La Cienaga. Jack Holden is obviously modeled on William Holden who starred in The Bridges of Toko-Ri (1954). and the Tom Waits character is modeled on Mark Robson. Jon Peters was Barbra Streisand's hair stylist and, later, a Hollywood producer.  Gary Valentine is modeled on Gary Goetzman. a child star who operated a water-bed emporium and, later, a pinball arcade; he became partners with Tom Hanks and is now a producer.  Joel Wachs, the closeted politician, was a real city councilman who did, in fact, repeal the law prohibiting pinball arcades.  John C. Reilly appears in a cameo role as Fred Munster at the Teen Fair, also an actual event, although last held the year before the movie's ostensible period -- that is, in 1972.  Christine Ebersole plays a version of Lucille Ball; Under One Roof is based on a film, not a TV series, in which Ball starred.  Most of the movie's locations are in the San Fernando valley where Anderson grew up.)