Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Tom Waits.
Production: United States
An excessive cameo count almost overshadows a fanciful age gap romance which ludicrously floats along beside water beds, pinball machines and the 1970s oil crisis in California’s San Fernando Valley.
It’s as if director Paul Thomas Anderson used up every name in his contact list, some more recognizable than others, when putting together a dazzlingly obscure cast.
Bradley Cooper appears as the psychotic, lascivious boyfriend of Barbara Streisand, while Sean Penn is a suave actor from Hollywood’s golden age and Tom Waits a director and raconteur who can render any audience spellbound – even unsuspecting restaurant patrons – with his on set escapades. Then there are the less glamorous fleeting appearances.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s father, the son of the great Philip Seymour Hoffman (Cooper Hoffman, in his first leading role) and all of the pop-rock group Haim – including Alana as the main protagonist – and their real life mother and father, also appear in a preposterous but hilarious story of mismatched love.
Gary Valentine (Hoffman) is an overconfident, smarmy 15-year-old high school student and aspiring actor who takes a shine to photographer’s assistant Alana Kane (Haim) while getting his yearbook photo taken.
Alana, who is at least 10 years older than the school sophomore, immediately laughs off his advances but is worn down by his cocksure perseverance and agrees to a date of sorts.
Although Gary is smitten Alana bluntly rejects any notion of a relationship. Instead she agrees to a friendship, chaperoning him on an acting job in New York where she falls for one of his co-stars before eventually being worn down by the dubious charms of the teenager.
There is an inevitability about the plot drivers which propel the unlikely and sometimes uncomfortable romance between the pair, however Haim’s effortlessly funny performance as the sassy, headstrong and foul mouthed Alana make even the ridiculous story seem faintly believable.
Her force of nature display is staggering considering it is her on screen debut.
Gary, and his even younger band of friends, punt waterbeds and open up a pinball arcade, selling to the stars as a maniacal Cooper almost steals the show as the libido obsessed maniacal partner of Streisand fixated on the pronunciation of her surname.
Thomas Anderson has the license to get away with almost anything, this is the director who was allowed to inflict the overbearingly long and horrifically dull and overacted There Will Be Blood and The Master on audiences.
Along with some other outrageous cameos, Harriet Sansom Harris as Gary’s overly enthusiastic and gullible agent stands out, the darling of Hollywood takes quite a few major missteps.
In what could be interpreted as some kind of bizarre swipe at political correctness, he includes scenes in which an American businessman (John Michael Higgins) opening up a Japanese restaurant – a novelty at the time – openly mocks his Japanese wives using gibberish while pretending to understand their native language.
Both unnecessary and pointlessly offensive, it serves no other purpose than to provoke cheap laughs.
There are also too many haphazard swerves into unexplored and pointless territory – references to the 1973 oil crisis and a subplot about a mayoral candidate hiding his sexuality. Both are incongruous and cumbersome dips into far more serious subjects amid a silly love story involving teenagers and a surly twentysomething left jaded by the confines of her strict Jewish family and boring job.
Played out to an inspired soundtrack, including tracks from The Doors, David Bowie and Paul McCartney, it relentlessly drags on over two hours but is continually revived by the wit and brilliance of a career defining tour de force from Haim.
Stephen Kasiewicz 