****1/2 Three and a half stars
Luckily Paul Thomas Anderson (not always perfect but always a director in absolute mastery of his art, always an interesting director) he doesn’t get carried away by fashions and modes of cinema and makes his own. This is perhaps his kindest and heartiest movie (although “Drunk on Love” and “Boogie Nights” were full of all that), because it’s also somewhat autobiographical.
The California near Hollywood from the early seventies is the setting for the story of friendship or love between a boy who is almost a TV star and a girl who is older than him but perhaps – just perhaps – more naive. The affection with which Anderson -always virtuous- works on his characters (incidentally Cooper Hoffman, the protagonist, is the son of Phillip Seymour Hoffmann, Anderson’s longtime friend, who used to hold him in his arms and take care of him; here he does it with the camera) shows
that the filmmaker looks at the past without nostalgia (there is no gloating over the time that has passed) but rather as a way of building a personality through experience.
This may make the reader think that this is a “serious” film. It is, but not in the sense of “solemn”: it is happyvibrant, human and, at times, funny. It is much more than an autobiography or period story: it is an x-ray
about what youth is and what weight it has on the rest of our lives. And yes, she is also very pretty.
