Licorice Pizza (2021); C'mon C'mon (2021)
(Alana Haim as Alana and Cooper Hoffman as Gary in Licorice Pizza)
Licorice Pizza (2021)
Throughout Licorice Pizza we often see the two protagonists, Alana (Alana Haim), 25, and Gary (Cooper Hoffman), 15, running, breakneck, usually toward or alongside one another, with hair flying and hopes hanging by a thread. They're racing to see if their lovelorn aspirations stand a chance. The script, by writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, suggests they don’t actually have much to worry about.
It’s 1973 in a San Fernando Valley that can seem oddly, even scarily, futureless, yet conceals as much soulful pining as any Kubla Khan pleasure palace. In the midst of banality, Anderson would have us believe, love can strike like destiny. He layers in a punchy soundtrack of songs from the era to help make his case.
But Alana and Gary’s love at first seems unlikely to flourish. There’s that 10-year gap in their ages for one thing. What’s more, she’s shut down any prospect of romance, working odd jobs and living at home with her family, who wonder when she’s going to pull her life together. Gary, on the other hand, believes that love may seem far off, but if you listen hard enough, you can hear it speeding toward you.
They meet when Alana assists a photographer taking class pictures at Gary’s high school. Gary sidles up to her, unable to stop himself from hitting on her. He’s immediately lovestruck and soon vows that one day he’ll marry her. Reminding him of their 10-year age difference, she tells him to get lost.
Undaunted, he awkwardly continues to trail her. He deduces, correctly, that she's lonely. She thinks that observation is painfully obvious, and dismisses his courting as absurd. She says, in essence, Forget it, doofus. Gary, his eyes alight with longing, responds, in essence, You’ll be mine one day. All in good time.
It was Anderson’s second feature, Boogie Nights (1997), that advanced his reputation from gifted newcomer to major directing talent. In that movie’s sensual hothouse, drugs, anarchically casual sex, tawdry showbiz ambitions and, yes, please, more drugs, held everyone in thrall. Anderson aimed his camera like a floating dart through rooms packed with crisscrossing actors, and he never confused the viewer. These frenzied, coke-fueled beasts of the porn world were unlovely but mesmerizing, and he prowled among them like a lion tamer brandishing a whip.
In Licorice Pizza, Anderson’s direction is just as agile, but, aside from Alana’s snippiness, almost all the emotions (except in a couple of inconsequential cameos featuring Sean Penn (tedious) and Bradley Cooper (fun)) are benign, nearly innocent. But life nonetheless spills confusingly, and Anderson lets his actors roam and shove each other around while his camera stands tenderly, lyrically, a bit apart. Becalmed in his choice of camera angles, he may be recapturing the giddy head trips of his own youth. Yet his guiding principle here is still to dash toward a finish line, if you can settle on where it is. Go for it. Run. Before it’s too late.
Alana and Gary seem to have little to offer one another. She’s disillusioned, through with love. He’s high on love’s possibilities, even as, in the real world, his career prospects are fading fast. His life as a child actor has put him nowhere near teenage stardom, and he’s rapidly outgrowing the kid TV show he’s featured on. With his acting hopes dwindling, he starts fly-by-night businesses, like selling water beds or operating a pinball parlor. With guile and help from friends, these ventures marginally succeed. He tries to persuade Alana that with her help one of his harebrained schemes will take off.
Unconvinced, Alana, trying at last to become an adult, joins a rising young city councilman’s campaign for mayor. She feels grown up for the first time, yet, when she gets a close look at the councilman’s sadly closeted gay relationship, she’s jolted into recognizing that she and Gary may have something worth preserving after all.
Alana declares that forcing love, which Gary can't help doing, is exasperating. But for Gary, forcing it is like breathing. He doesn't believe love happens any other way.
Anderson stays in comfortable command here with light, frictionless material. It’s more than two decades since he steered Boogie Nights, set in the same San Fernando Valley, where a movie porn community, as it were, kept a prophylactic on genuine connections.
But there was always truth in the Valley, Anderson seems to be saying now. It could be buried under the mundane. It could get lost. But it only needed to be insisted on. It was there all along.
Such a sweetly untroubled proposition doesn’t demand a lot from the actors, and Haim and Hoffman (the son of frequent Anderson collaborator Phillip Seymour Hoffman) perform with an abandon that the meager storytelling can’t entirely support. They're both loose and likeable. Whether we believe love can be consummated quite this breezily is a blissful question for a movie to leave us with.
(Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny and Woody Norman as Jesse in C’mon C’mon)
C’mon C’mon (2021)
Disarmingly, C’mon C’mon seems to tell you most of what you’ll need to know right at the outset. Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a single, New York-based radio journalist. When we meet him, he’s working on an audio project interviewing children around the country, getting them to open up on-air about how they see the future. Most of these expressive children, speaking with the poetic naivete of the unguarded, are newly arrived immigrants, or come from fractured homes, or are coping with parental substance abuse and neglect.
But they all find words for hope. Our empathy is stirred. And as Johnny patiently questions and records them, we see that he’s a sensitive, thoughtful listener.
Then his L.A.-based sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), asks him to come West to give her a hand. Her mentally ill ex-husband (Scott McNairy) has gone into a tailspin, and she has to go care for him in Oakland. But she can’t bring along her nine-year-old son, Jesse (Woody Norman), so Johnny agrees to take his nephew on the road with him.
No sweat, right? Johnny interviews perplexed kids as part of his job, so his own nephew’s bewilderment shouldn’t be too much of a reach.
Well, not so fast. As uncle and nephew hit the road, Jesse’s estrangement from – and love for – both his parents bring his fragile situation into sharper focus for Johnny. Viv cherishes her son, but she can’t be the male figure Jesse needs. He and his Uncle Johnny soon clash over Jesse’s moods, his stubbornness about what he eats, his endlessly shifting demands about where and how he sleeps. Johnny soon learns that Jesse is already an individual who won’t be pushed around or taken for granted.
In New York City, Johnny’s hometown, Jesse marvels at the close living quarters, the varieties of food, the pulsating, hectic street life. And here Jesse can roam around, on foot, which he could never do in spread-out California. It also brings out his impatience at not being grown up enough to go where he pleases and set his own boundaries. Are his parents and their problems going to permanently entrap him? Is being with Johnny a route out of his splintered home life? Is Johnny, the untrammeled bachelor, the kind of man Jesse wants to be?
When Johnny's assignment on the interview project takes the two of them to New Orleans, these questions take on a renewed urgency.
The director, Mike Mills, has also helmed Beginners (2010), about his father, who came out as gay late in life, a role that won Christopher Plummer his Oscar, and 20th Century Women (2016), based on Mills’ mother, played by Annette Bening, a woman who raised her children without a consistent male partner around. So Mills knows from, and here artfully draws on, dislocation and jerry built relationships, where intimacy doesn't spring from traditional family ties but has to be slowly won.
The movie hums when the sometimes affectionate, sometimes puzzled, sometimes testy confrontations between Johnny and Jesse shake them both up. Phoenix is appealing because he never makes Johnny conventionally “likeable”; instead, he gamely fights out with Jesse just how far their newfound trust can take them. Phoenix moves, eats, even slouches like a longtime New York City bachelor. He’s fully animated, but, closely honoring the script, never seems to be inventing on his own Johnny's distress or sighs of relief.
Norman in the role of Jesse is exacting yet relaxed. Jesse is a bright and truly irritating kid, who’s difficult because he’s had to work within the limited, if completely genuine, affection his single mother can make time to give him.
His often absent, erratic father is the opposite of the gregarious, spontaneous Johnny, but as time with his uncle goes on, he grasps that Johnny isn’t, and can’t ever be, a replacement for his father. Johnny hasn’t given Jesse a break from his life so much as opened a path for him to return to it and embrace it.
Hoffman’s crackling Viv, who stays in touch with her son and brother by phone, warmly refuses to give either of them any easy ways out.
Composed in unpretentious black and white by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, C'mon C'mon’s beauty is never distracting. Mills doesn’t use pretty pictures — and many shots here are gorgeous — to con you into assenting to its fluid emotions. He lets the characters stay ordinary, their truth-telling commonplace, their revelations less than earth-shattering.
But all these people grow in ways that we sense they won't retreat from. At the end, you know Johnny, Jesse and Viv have all changed. And yet at the same time they’re more deeply satisfied being who they are.