Everyman Bristol
So we bought a season ticket to the Everyman Cinema. In order to justify the expense, we are now morally obliged to see all the films that we wouldn’t normally see. Since we talk about them afterwards, sometimes over a beer cocktail at Flip Side cocktail bar; Sofa-Buddy should probably be regarded as co-writer of these mini-reviews.
We had seen the trailer for Licorice Pizza at least seventy six times before getting to the actual movie. The trailer made it clear that it involved a protagonist who couldn't pronounce Barbara Striesand's name, but didn't make it at all clear what the film was about. Having now seen it, I am not sure that I have any better idea.
It was certainly produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, who definitely produced There Will Be Blood. There Will Be Blood is monumentally epic -- Citizen Kane epic, Godfather epic. Licorice Pizza really isn’t. Although it is certainly and specifically set in Southern California.
It’s not a romantic comedy and it’s also not a coming of age drama. The main character Gary (played by Cooper Hoffman) is 15 years old and a moderately successful child actor; in the opening scenes he develops a quite innocent crush on Alana (Alana Hain) who is in her twenties. He seems to have money -- he eats at restaurants every night -- and parents who let him live more or less as he wishes. She is fascinated by him and agrees to be a “chaperone” when he goes on a performing gig in New York. There is nothing sexual or sleazy about their relationship: Lolita is another thing the film very definitely isn’t. (I have never read Lolita.) Maybe it’s more a sort of oddball buddy movie about their relationship.
It rolls along compellingly enough and passes the Rilstone Test with flying colours. (A film passes the Rilstone Test if you can answer "yes" to the question "While watching the movie, was I thinking "What are these people going to do?" as opposed to "What plot twist is the writer going to come up with?" This is only a good test for the kinds of films which it is is a good test for.) It is nice to see a not-romantic film in which the main characters are not conventionally attractive. Gary is quite podgy and doesn’t have particularly good skin; but he is so confident and gets such good lines that you can see why Alana would be attracted to him. When the show-business dries up, he uses his money to hustle his way through various businesses -- first selling waterbeds and then running pin-ball arcades -- and we are continually impressed with what a good salesman he is. I suppose kids of fifteen and sixteen really did set themselves up in small businesses in California in the 1970s.
The two of them get mixed up in a sequence of more or less unrelated episodes involving a much more extreme and grotesque cast of characters, but are largely un-phazed by them. In one scene Alana finds herself with a couple of aging actors in one of Gary's restaurants; one of the actors gets very drunk and seeks to demonstrate that he can still do his old trick of jumping a motor bike over burning tyres. In another, Gary is randomly and mistakenly arrested for murder and immediately released. Alana volunteers to work for a genuinely well-meaning mayoral candidate -- who turns out to be conducting a secret gay affair which she has to help him cover up. The much trailed scene about the gentleman who dates Barbara Striesand (I would also have said StriesLAND) is a great set piece: having deliberately trashed his house and his car, the pair and their friends find that their truck has run out of petrol (or presumably gas) and have to escape by freewheeling down a series of hills -- a borderline action-movie sequence, and very funny. While working for the candidate, Alana finds out that pinball machines are about to be legalised, giving Gary his business opportunity. (No, I don't know why pinball machines were ever illegal in California. Had anti-gambling laws prohibited all slot machines, or was there a moral panic about pinball, in the way that there was about Space Invaders a decade later? Or was there just a sense that pinball was a bit sleazy? I seem to recall that the Music Man was predicated on the belief that no decent town would allow a pool table to pass the thresh-hold.)
I feel I have seen several other films about people who are just on the edge of show-business: there were moments in the first half which almost made me think of a less glamorous La-La Land. There is a very funny early sequence where Alana goes for an audition and Gary tells her to agree to anything but draws the line when she’s asked if she would do topless scenes . “You remind me of an English guard dog” says the agent “But with sex appeal and a very Jewish nose.”
But I did keep wondering if the film had a point which I was missing. I realised early on that no-one was going to tragically die in a car crash and Gary was neither going to hit the big time nor turn out really to be a murderer. I briefly wondered if the film was about some famous person I had never heard of -- if I was supposed to know that all these side-hustles were eventually going to turn into a legendary success story, rather as if I were watching the Social Network without having the faintest idea who Mark Zuckerburg was. But apparently not -- some of the characters are based on real people known to the director, but it isn’t a roman de clef.
When I was a student in the 1980s the film club seemed to show a lot of films about characters who wander about being quite funny or quite angst ridden without ever quite intersecting with an actual plot. Several of them were by Woody Allen, come to think of it, although my brain seems to have filed Scorcese's New York, New York in the same box. So maybe that’s what all films without superheroes or space-ships in them are like.
I enjoyed it quite a lot. Wouldn’t go and see it again, probably, but enjoyed getting to know the characters. You should probably give it look.
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