This rom com in the lowest profile of show-biz, business and politics feels like a nostalgic love letter to an era. But it can't be. Paul Thomas Anderson, mainstream auteur since the late '90s, was born in 1970. He might well have observed much of the culture in the first ten years of his life but the depth of this retroversion cannot be his. The point is, as the publicity has it, a navigation of first love and that is a fitting description. However confident Gary gets he's still a teenager and doesn't always get it right. The age gap being ten rather than sixty years disqualifies this tale as a take on Harold and Maude unless you look aroung at everything else the film is presenting and scale it down to point of view. Gary does call Alanah old at one point. He savours it but ackowledges it. It's actually in line for him to consider her unreachably old on the scale he's living. His waterbed business is a success but he's not going to be a millionaire from it. The extension into pinball parlours is the same. Alanah's journey into politics is as a volunteer for a local councillor's campaign. These characters see only that they have started in on these things and to them they stand as tall as name-brand entrepreneurs and senators. Their encroachment on the edges of Hollywood is also small time when we look at it but the stuff of stardom when they do. Ten years is an age.
I'll let this go in a minute but the '70s setting is really getting to me, lately. It's persistent. I recently revisited the long cut of Almost Famous and it reminded me of Twentieth Century Women, Dazed and Confused, andthe tv shows I'm Dying Up Here and Vinyl. Some of these were made by people who could really wear a badge from the era but, increasingly, that is less important than using the era for other ends.
If I get nostalgic it's very localised. I don't just mean the town I grew up in but a series of experiences and sensual memory joggers like the smell of lawns or the hardness of chlorinated pool water. It's never about how we wrote better songs in them days or that's when they could really make a movie. The persistent return of American movies to this decade does evoke a lot of Altman, Scorsese and Coppola. In Anderson's case (he's already been there with Boogie Nights) it's far less a longing for the Los Angeles he knew when you could buy records from Licorice Pizza shops in the shopping strips than it is a way of saying that this is before social media, internet, mobile phones, Trumpism, 911 and punk, a world not so much innocent as one berfore collapse. It's a way of saying once upon a time.
Once upon a time it was goofy and cool to start your own business as a teenager. Once upon a time, pinball tables could fill a shop at night. Once upon a time a William Holden type aging movie star might try an Evil Kneivel jump over a bonfire for a dare. Once upon a time a big star's boyfriend could act like Charles Manson just to get his way and still be associated with the star. This is the cultural battleground that Gary must navigate to get to Alanah, knowing that she might just infally reject him once he's done. Put the features of 2021, even pre-plague 2021, in there and it's like seeing all the telegraph poles and stop signs in a comic book. Try that and you'll be clamouring to get back to 1973, whether or not you started there.
There are, mind you, some hard edged (and spoilery) plot points that make the era important to the film. Then again, you could still lose them and tell this story. That's the next thing: do we need over two hours to tell this story? There is no industry timeline to follow as with Boogie Nights, nor a massive crowded canvas of slowly converging stories as in Magnolia, it's really just a rom com. Just as Punch Drunk Love did it all in ninety-five minutes, this one could, too. What we're getting with that extra forty minutes is world building. It's never boring but if you really just want to say it, keep it to the earlier movie's guidelines. As to the filmmaking, it's a treat: effortless moving camera (some of the most beautiful shots of people running) the telltale grain of celluloid (and lighting for celluloid), shooting and editing that can range from the fetishistic to white-knucle action. PT Anderson is a cine-master.
Anyway, one of the reasons why it's never boring is Anderson's usual brilliant casting and handling of his players. Having done more than his bit to establish Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson offered a passed baton to Hoffman's son Cooper. Cooper Hoffman, centre screen as Gary is the image of his father with the same natural magnetism and a grin that could sell you your own toenail clippings. Alana Haim and her entire family play Alana and her entire family. Like Hoffman, his is her feature debut and she exudes a mean charisma of her own. The might-be couple hold the screen together or apart, making them the focal point and centre of gravity and they never falter. Big claps, too, to Bradley Cooper in an edgy role and a chin-stroking "yes, actually" to Sean Penn for being spookily like the William Holden of the '70s when he only-just passed himself off as middle aged when wooing a much younger Faye Dunaway in Network back in '76.
So, do we allow someone like Anderson to make a brief rom com but give it the scale of a star studded war epic? We indulge Christopher Nolan for making action movies that last longer than afternoons under the plea that they are intellectually rich (rather than just long). Perhaps the key lies in knowing that a film like this does not feel like it's taking that long. Do you need that Taxi Driver reference in there? Sure, it justifies the career choice of one of the two leads and anchors itself in political history but if you took it out and put something else there ...? What can I say? I enjoyed every moment but was nagged by how tight and deep Punch Drunk Love was. Maybe I just miss the noughties ;)
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