FEATURE:
Ripe Fruit on the July Tree
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza and an Incredible Soundtrack
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EVEN though it has been out for…
a little bit now, I wanted to discuss the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson. Licorice Pizza, I think, refers to a vinyl record. There is a record shop in the U.S. called Licorice Pizza, so I wonder whether Anderson got the title from that. With the likes of Sean Penn and Tom Waits featuring in the film (which features Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in the lead roles), I especially love the soundtrack and the songs featured. The plot is this: In 1973 San Fernando Valley, teenager Gary Valentine meets Alana Kane, a photographer's assistant in her 20s, at his high school on picture day. They become friends, start a waterbed company together, audition for films, and get involved with Joel Wachs' mayoral campaign. They navigate a changing time politically and culturally while also dealing with a gas crisis. Valentine and Kane's journey leads to them interacting with figures of both Old and New Hollywood, including Jon Peters and Jack Holden. The film was released on 26th November in the U.S. It has already received some hugely positive reviews. I will come to a couple of them, as it gives context to the film and the songs included. You can buy the soundtrack here. Early this month, Pitchfork announced details of the soundtrack:
“Republic Records has revealed the tracklist and release date for the Licorice Pizza soundtrack. The album features songs by David Bowie, Nina Simone, and Paul McCartney and Wings, Donovan, Sonny & Cher, Gordon Lightfoot, and more. Additionally, it features the new song “Licorice Pizza,” made by frequent Paul Thomas Anderson collaborator Jonny Greenwood. Find the tracklist for the Licorice Pizza soundtrack below.
Licorice Pizza (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is out November 26. The movie, Paul Thomas Anderson’s first since Phantom Thread, hits theaters on Christmas Day. Licorice Pizza is set in the San Fernando Valley in 1973 and stars Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, as well as Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, and Benny Safdie”
Given the name of the film, I think that is why Anderson’s musical choices are especially considered. Featuring tracks such as David Bowie’s Life on Mars?, Sonny & Cher’s But You're Mine, and Nina Simone’s July Tree, there is a bounty of fascinating and eclectic songs. I guess one needs to see the film to understand how the music pairs with various scenes, though I have been compelled to watch the film and seek it out on the strength of the soundtrack. Before talking more about it, here are a couple of reviews for Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film. This is The A.V. Club’s reaction:
“The spark is lit in the opening scene, as 15-year-old child actor Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Anderson’s late muse, Philip Seymour Hoffman) first lays eyes on 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim, one of the three sisters of the rock band Haim) outside a photo studio. He’s a teenager and she’s not—a fact she repeats repeatedly, if only to remind herself—but there’s an undeniable chemistry detectable in the spaces between her jabs and amused rebukes. “I met the girl I’m going to marry one day,” waxes the teen to his kid brother later that night. We wonder if he’s right.
One might think of that other Anderson. There is, after all, a touch of Max Fischer in Gary, who’s pantomiming a life of adult sophistication and privilege—ordering Coca-Colas in his white suit at nightclubs, flanked by an entourage of comically pubescent friends. Gary, we learn, is rapidly aging out of whatever modest celebrity he’s achieved; his career is over before it’s begun. Yet he has the swagger of a young Hollywood somebody. And though Alana, who works at the photo studio, talks to him like the kid brother she never had (she actually has two sisters, played by Haim’s real sisters and bandmates), she’s plainly attracted, at the very least, to his proximity to fame. And so she’s pulled into the orbit of his teenage hustles, and even ends up working for him, an arrangement that echoes the thrust of Phantom Thread.
The plot is a crazy-quilt time capsule, pulling in the waterbed craze, the oil embargo of ’73, the pinball ban, a tight L.A. political race, and the amorous shit-kicking of New Hollywood. Anderson’s structure is borderline associative, his screenplay daisy-chaining the ephemera that may well have colored his own childhood in the Valley. Early on, the director—who shot the movie himself, with an assist from Michael Bauman—tracks his camera across the floor of a teen business expo, soaking in every gleaming shag detail of his early-’70s production design. In its loving mirage of a bygone Los Angeles, Licorice Pizza is like a gemini twin to Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood, the last movie from fellow ’90s hotshot turned indiewood royalty Quentin Tarantino.
The cast is stacked with familiar faces and scions, the fathers of famous men and the daughters of famous directors, brought in for walk-ons or to steal a single scene. We get Sean Penn, skin rough like leather, as an aging man’s man who’s William Holden in all but Christian name. Elsewhere, Anderson doesn’t even bother to slightly rename his supporting players from history, casting Uncut Gems director Benny Safdie as the closeted L.A. politician Joel Wachs. And the film’s extended comic highlight involves the famed producer Jon Peters, pricelessly played by Bradley Cooper as a rich-dick lothario teetering, in his unfiltered asides, on the edge of danger; a waterbed installation at his swanky house in the hills becomes a gauntlet of close calls and mishaps, culminating with a van rolling perilously through traffic.
It’s a great scene. And there are plenty more, especially in the freewheeling first hour of the movie, animated by the electric currents of Gary’s and Alana’s dovetailing experiences. Yet as a story, Licorice Pizza barely hangs together. Anderson, high on his own nostalgic supply (and on the FM reverie of his all-star soundtrack of Doors, Donovan, and more), stumbles through an endless series of oddball peripheral characters and comic situations, some funnier than others. (There’s one strange recurring bit with John Michael Higgins as a restaurateur doing an outrageous Japanese accent that feels like it could have been plucked out of a bad ’70s comedy.) The director has made a blissed-out flashback portrait of his hometown that’s all incident, very little shape. He’s just riffing here, to sporadically satisfying effect”.
I will include one more review. I am interested in the various takes critics have had. As this review details, Anderson was very committed to authenticity when it came to the feel of the film – ensuring that, right down to the camera lenses, there was this sense of being right in the 1970s:
“Working as his own cinematographer, Anderson reportedly used camera lenses that Gordon Willis (cinematographer of The Godfather) had back in the 1970s. They give the entire film a slight softness that reminds you of Bad News Bears, Meatballs and Little Darlings, an almost subliminal callback to an era and a style that’s long gone but many viewers instinctually remember, whether on celluloid or in real life. There’s a sequence in this film with a moving truck as it navigates canyon roads that feels like William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, but more tense because a couple of teenagers are behind the wheel.
But he utilizes these set pieces to highlight how young lovers — even ones resisting inevitable attraction — become bonded through acts of adversity, such as a run-in with the law, or in other cases see their life and their choices in relief with the momentary fun they might share. Whether or not Gary and Alana are healthy together, they are right for each other, providing what they can’t get anywhere from anyone else, even if they might never possess the language (much less self-awareness) to say what that is out loud.
Ultimately, if its title fails to fully or precisely capture the energy of the film (except as another reference to a San Fernando institution only a handful of privileged individuals will recognize), the director's latest is nevertheless an invigorating delight; lived in and yet spontaneous; thrilling but also gorgeously understated.
Like a number of Anderson's earlier works, Licorice Pizza is as in love with the medium in which it was made as the story and characters within it. Even if its throwback cinematic style proves to be slightly too eccentric for your tastes, if there’s one thing Paul Thomas Anderson has demonstrated that he’s capable of it’s he can tell a love story you will absolutely believe in, whether or not you personally want to be a part of it”.
Because of the setting, you get this soundtrack with amazing songs from that decade (and tracks that are outside of the 1970s). I love how there is an inclusion of Henry VIII’s Greensleeves. Not many soundtracks can go from that to Donovan’s Barabajagal! Maybe the best soundtrack of the year, I think that the film and album will introduce a lot of younger listeners to some of the tracks from the 1970s. Although not every cut from the soundtrack features in the film, you will get a good taste of what is featured in the film. With The Doors sitting alongside Gordon Lightfoot, I wonder how highly we regard film soundtracks. They can obviously enhance a film and give it new context and layers. Whether you hear the Licorice Pizza soundtrack solo or watch the film and then go and hear the album, I think that a great soundtrack can do so much more than accompany a film’s release. We do have compilation albums still but, at a time when so many of us are making our own playlists and most albums are studio releases, a soundtrack is a preservation of the past. With the ability to cast his net far and wide, Anderson and those responsible for compiling the songs and deciding what was included had a hard choice. Looking down the tracklisting, and Licorice Pizza’s soundtrack ranks alongside the very best from the past few years. As I said, it has intrigued me enough to want to see the film, just to see where the songs fit in and how they score particular moments. Even if you plan on seeing the film or not, the soundtrack for Licorice Pizza is…
PHOTO CREDIT: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures Inc./MGM
A must-own for all music fans.