Susan Granger’s review of Licorice Pizza” (M.G.M./United Artists)
It’s the 1970s in the San Fernando Valley when 10th grader Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) first spies Alana Kane (Alana Haim) working for a yearbook headshot photographer. He’s 15 and she’s in her mid-20s. But that doesn’t stop him from asking her for a date.
How will he pay for it? she inquires. Not a problem. He’s a smooth-talking former child star, declaring: “I’m a showman. It’s my calling.”
If not a showman, a real hustler. With entrée to the Valley’s ever-popular Tail O’ The Cock restaurant, he sells waterbeds out of a storefront; when that fad fades, he peddles pinball machines.
(FYI: Considered a form of gambling, pinball was banned from 1939-1973.)
Now if you find it credible that a pimply 15-year-old who doesn’t even have a driver’s license can woo and win an attractive 25-year-old, this story might intrigue you.
Even Alana acknowledges: “Don’t you think it’s weird that I hang out with Gary and his friends all the time?”
So filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” “Punch Drunk Love”) uses star-studded cameos. Sean Penn is Jack Holden, a fading film star who plops Alana on the back of his motorcycle, and Bradley Cooper is hairstylist-turned-producer Jon Peters, Barbra Streisand’s then-boyfriend.
Diversions like Tom Waits’ aging film director and Harriet Sansom Harris’ casting director are far more interesting than Gary’s avid pursuit of Alana.
Family connections abound: Cooper Hoffman’s father was Philip Seymour Hoffman. Leonardo DiCaprio’s father George sells a waterbed. Alana Haim’s real-life parents play her parents and her sisters are members of Haim, a Grammy-nominated rock band.
As a youngster, Paul Thomas Anderson had a crush on his teacher, Dolores Rose Haim, Alana’s mother – giving him the idea for the story. And Licorice Pizza was the real name of a vinyl record store that Sam Goody subsequently bought out.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Licorice Pizza” is a far-fetched, improbably frolicsome 5, Oscar-nominated nominated as Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
