*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Eva B. Ross’s essay here.*
What happened to the great American director? What a way to start a piece. Let me be specific: what happened to the amiable but ambitious, good hearted and humanist but not naive or afraid of the darkness storyteller who avoids genre, who works off original material, who operates in that budgetary sweet spot between 5 and 50 million that we call “mid-budget,” who tells, not to sound too flag-humpy, honest stories about distinctly American characters, who is a household name but not a hack, and not a pretentious blowhard either? Another way of asking the question is, since he died in 2006, has anyone truly filled Robert Altman’s shoes?
Of the Gen X crop who came up in the ‘90s, who succeeded the generation of Robert Zemeckises and Penny Marshalls who succeeded the Altmans and Scorseses before them, there is only one answer: Paul Thomas Anderson. Since his breakout hit Boogie Nights hit theaters in 1997, Anderson has earned, by making film after solid film, a place in the director’s pantheon quite unlike any other at his level. He’s well-regarded in auteur-inclined, film enthusiast circles, but not regarded as pretentious, like a Wes Anderson sometimes is. He’s also well-known beyond those cinephilic confines by general audiences, but doesn’t carry around the stench of flabby populism, like a Steven Spielberg. And when a new film of his premieres, it often feels like an event, but not a Nolan-esque, gimmicked-up spectacle.
You get the picture. PTA, as his admirers casually refer to him, is something of film world Goldilocks. The calibration across multiple levels on his films is almost always just right. They’re intelligent and original, yet accessible and entertaining, full of people we all recognize from our own lives, yet Anderson manages to elevate the often quotidian, human struggles of those characters to a level of sacred importance. There’s one ingredient listed above that’s crucial to the recipe of a successful PTA stew that deserves close inspection. First, because it’s an aspect that’s in increasingly short supply among his contemporaries, and even more scarce among the upcoming generation of filmmakers. Second, because it’s the aspect that lights his newest film, Licorice Pizza, from within, giving it a rare glow that touches the heart, and imbues each scene with an infectious optimism. That’s its mid-level budget.
Licorice Pizza is many things: a San Fernando Valley love letter, a semi-autobiographical film for Anderson, a coming of age film, and possibly a breakout vehicle for its two debut stars: Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman. In the film, 25-year-old Alana Kane (Haim) and 15 year old Gary Valentine (Hoffman) fatefully meet at Valentine’s high school, where Alana’s at work assisting with class portraits. The smooth-talking teenager, a self-professed “showman” who has been a “song and dance man” since he was a kid, assaults Alana with a charm offensive. He compliments her appearance, asks if she’s seen his films (“Do you go to the movies?” he asks with a cheeseball grin. “Of course I go to the movies,” is her un-wooed, Valley brat response.), and asking her out for a drink numerous times. She repeatedly questions their age gap with stunned invective, a grim prophecy of A Discourse to come, but when the time comes, shows up to claim that drink.
Once Gary and Alana join at the hip, in a fluid dynamic that is part romantic, part fraternal, part babysitter and snotty charge, and part mutually parasitic Hollywood usey-ness, it’s clear they’re joined for life. In what feels like Anderson’s ‘70s answer to what Tarantino did for the ‘60s in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Gary and Alana rove through a highlight reel of L.A.’s post-Manson paranoid decade. They start a waterbed business, but it’s short lived because of the 1973 oil crisis (“vinyl is made from oil, you fucking idiot,” Alana has to explain to Gary). Then they pivot to pinball machines when those become legal again. Alana volunteers on Joel Wachs’ campaign for city council and rides on the back of a fading actor’s (Sean Penn) motorcycle in the golf course outside Tail o’ the Cock. Gary hawks beds at a Teen Age (two words) fair, where Alana’s come “to sell earrings for my friend Jojo.” The age gap between them, which I felt was easily reconciled by Gary’s maturity of look and experience and Alana’s comparative naivete and girlishness, is nevertheless very ‘70s. So too is the frankly appalling and unignorable anti-Asian racism that spews out of John Michael Higgins’ mouth whenever he’s on screen. The best you can say for that is it’s indeed, unfortunately, very 1970s.
If all this makes Licorice Pizza sound discombobulated or didactic, it isn’t. The film is sequenced like a slipstream, logical enough to follow but not so deterministic that it loses its effervescent, meandering charm. The film moves the way Alana and Gary run through the city during the oil crisis, which leaves cars marooned on the sidewalk. It’s spontaneous, energetic, and free. And that well-earned, heart-warming feeling of freedom comes right back to its budget. Licorice Pizza is the most mid-budget film I’ve seen in years. It’s like Forrest Gump. Like Silence of the Lambs or Good Will Hunting. Original. Bursting with character. Expensive but not 100 million dollar CG uncanny valley expensive, which just circles back to cheap. It was a big enough production to create a world within, one that you can smell, taste, reach out and touch, and carry back home with you. But not so big that investors investors inked franchise potential into the contract, which made its way into the script, and thus into the mind of its nervous, overburdened director.
Licorice Pizza is through and through a ‘70s movie, but it invariably harkens back to the ‘90s, the last gasp of an industry model which just gave money to artists, period. Not on the condition that they make IP tie-in trash before or after they make the art. Anderson makes it clear enough in Licorice Pizza that we can’t go back to the ‘70s, and probably shouldn’t want to. But I hope the film’s rare, transportive pleasures convince those who need to be convinced that we can go back to a time where films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s are the rule, not the exception.
