Cooper Hoffman

(Amazon Streaming, August 2022) Over the past twenty-some years, I’ve learned to like Wes Anderson’s films, to enjoy the quirks of the Coen Brothers, to pay respect to Pedro Almodovar’s approach, and to take the good with the less-good in Steven Soderbergh’s filmography. But I’m still as ambivalent about Paul Thomas Anderson’s work as I was when watching Punch-Drunk Love in theatres. There’s clearly some kind of genius at work here (or, at the very least, a cinephile filmmaker), but while I can like moments of his films, they all generally fall flat when considered as a whole. Licorice Pizza is no exception. I was more interested in the film than his previous ones, by its virtue of focusing on 1973 Hollywood, with its fictional characters interacting with the movie industry and more-or-less disguised historical figures. In that, the film generally holds its promises: Sean Penn plays a character meant to evoke William Holden (although the real Holden was reportedly not as much into romancing young girls as the Penn caricature), an excerpt of Breezy is quoted in an audition scene, Tom Waits has quite a bit of fun playing a take-off on Samuel Peckinpah, while Bradley Cooper easily walks away with the film’s highlights with a nightmare caricature of producer Jon Peters. Still, much of the film revolves around a teenager ably played by Cooper Hoffman, a child actor who realizes he’s got a brighter future as an entrepreneur than an actor. The plot of the film, as it goes from the first to the last scene, has to do with his romantic infatuation for a woman eight years older (a great performance from Alana Haim). And this is where Licorice Pizza, for all of its finely observed period details, Hollywood insider fun and good cinematic eye, starts falling apart. For one thing, there’s something gratuitously, deliberately wrong in picking a romance between a sixteen-year-old boy and twenty-four-year-old woman—just imagine a gender-flipped film and see how far that thought goes. It seems even more unexplainable that a slight rewrite could have made it more palatable—bump his age by three years, reduce hers by two and you’re close to something still interesting but not quite as repellent. But that’s small potatoes compared to the film’s biggest issue—an episodic structure that can’t keep its tone straight or its events at least plausible. It’s even worse when you consider that the entire film takes place over less than a year—and again, there’s a wasted opportunity to show growth and lessen the age-difference factor. But no, Licorice Pizza jumps from one long sequence to another—some of them funny, some of them not, many of them just dull. Now, not everything has to stick to a Fieldsesque three-act structure, but as not of it seems deliberate for no good reason. Is it still worth watching? Well, more than many other films of the same director. But frankly, given the choice, I get more consistent results with the vulgar authorism of Paul W. S. Anderson.