licorice pizza (w&d pt anderson)

3 things about LP

Running. LP reminded me of early Godard. I think it’s Bande a Part where the characters seem to spend half the film running around Paris. In a similar way to Godard’s characters, LP’s star crossed lovers’ energy cannot be contained, and boils over into several running sequences. This ardent youthful energy drives the film forwards, even when they and the film lose their way. Because this is a film that meanders, (PTA has rarely been a fan of the succinct), it tries to cram more in than it really can get away with, sometimes seeming to throw in sequences just for the hell of it, or to see Sean Penn fall of a bike. In this sense it’s a wonderful adolescent mess and the best way to get out of a mess is to run away from it.

Fellini. There was one moment, I think when Gary is arrested, where the ubiquitous Johny Greenwood score kicked in and it felt like pure Fellini. The whole movie is bathed in a kind of Fellini-esque nostalgia. It has the feel of what they call a passion piece, a homage to the director’s youth, also akin to Cuaron’s Roma. Not many directors get to make their passion pieces, so fair play to PTA, even if…

Politics. As regular readers will be aware, I went to see Boogie Nights not that long ago. Quite apart from its PTA-esque flair, Boogie Nights felt as though it contained a subversive commentary on the American dream. A commentary wrapped up in a tremendously entertaining movie, but one whose punch corresponded to the force of its sly message. The same could be said about Magnolia. LP has much of the flair but little of the commentary and less of the subversion. You could make an argument that the Nixon/ oil crisis reference is doing this, but it feels shoe-horned. People will love LP and part of the reason they will love it is precisely because it doesn’t ask its audience to think too hard. They can bask in its meandering flow. (In this sense if feels like a sister piece to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, another film that ranges the hills without dying on any of them.) Many will be delighted by Anderson letting them off the hook, but to this cussed commentator it sometimes left the sensation of a beer with too much froth.