I have seen the MGM lion roar uncountable times but there’s something particularly exciting when it performs for a Paul Thomas Anderson film. It feels like being pushed back to an age where monumental films were made, except there’s no need to go that far from where I am sitting right now because I know something worthy of that allure is about to start.
It has been called a coming-of-age affair but the whimsically titled Licorice Pizza is more than that, and it doesn’t take longer than the opening to get it. If I ever considered walk-and-talk scenes a bit stagy or mannered, PTA proves me wrong by choreographing actors and sprinklers in a masterfully written sequence that while casting golden shades on the incredible talent of the two leads, frames at once the characters, their wants, and the world they live in.
There begins a picaresque SoCal romantic journey that is also, and rather quintessentially, about the pivotal American Seventies, those of a country trying to come to terms with Watergate, Vietnam, Charlie Manson, and desperately hustle the lost optimism of the previous decade into a new form of energy—the same, incidentally, that will irreversibly affect the entire Western culture.
The only thing that didn’t quite convince me is the parade of celebrities cameos (Bradley Cooper, Sean Penn and Tom Waits in particular, but also Harriet Sansom Harris’ vague caricatured homage to her own role in Phantom Thread). However hilarious, they seem to unnecessarily downgrade the otherwise brilliant comedic side of the film to a slightly cliched level. Minor flaw, if one at all, because Licorice Pizza is nonetheless quite as dazing as cinema can be.