Alana, they make Gary seem only more of a
sweet, genuine exception.
As an amiable, sometimes satirical odyssey
populated with outsized characters, “Licorice
Pizza” reminded me of an Elaine May film.
It’s a golden detour for Anderson, who rarely
strays outside California but whose attraction
to a subject, mood and tone is endlessly
unpredictable. As a love story, it’s not too
different from his previous film, “Phantom
Thread,” or the earlier “Punch Drunk Love”
(which featured Cooper’s late father, Philip
Seymour Hoffman, an Anderson regular, selling
mattresses — a tender connection to the water
beds hawked by his son in “Licorice Pizza”).
The self-promoting Gary, too, could be a junior
version to some of the hucksters of Anderson’s
past films: Philip Baker Hall’s gambler in “Hard
Eight”; Mark Wahlberg’s porn star in “Boogie
Nights”; Daniel Day-Lewis’ oilman in “There Will
Be Blood.”
But “Licorice Pizza” feels like something
different, like the culmination of a
deconstructionist phase for Anderson —
a virtuoso filmmaker who since his most
sprawling epics (“Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,”
“There Will Be Blood,” “The Master”) has
moved increasingly toward humble, organic
little movies. Always a personal filmmaker,
Anderson has seemed to steadily pare
away. His fingerprints on his films are less
emphatic but more ubiquitous. (As he did
on “Phantom Thread,” Anderson here serves
as his own cinematographer, this time
alongside Michael Bauman.) “Licorice Pizza,”
which includes cameos from Maya Rudolph
(Anderson’s wife), John C. Reilly and others,