Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the modern grandmasters of American cinema so his oeuvre is usually a must watch. I held off on this one for a long while as it didn’t sound like something I would like and unfortunately it turned out to be true. This is one of those made by Hollywood for Hollywood films that is difficult for those on the outside to decipher. The central story about an inappropriate, and perhaps toxic, relationship felt unappealing to me though I find it amusing to think of it as a kind of antiromantic romance film.

15-year-old high school student Gary Valentine asks the 25-year-old Alana Kane for a date while she is in his school working as an assistant to take class photos of the students. She is skeptical of his ability to even pay for dinner but he reveals that he is actually a child actor and so has plenty of money. When Gary’s mother is unable to take him to New York on a press tour, he hires Alana to be his chaperone instead, and so begins an unusual relationship. Alana is more attracted to other guys including other actors she gets to know through Gary but something always goes wrong with those relationships. As Gary ages out of his child acting roles, he ventures out into businesses of his own, including selling waterbeds. He hires Alana to help with the sales and she often serves as his driver to get around town. Gary keeps wanting a romantic relationship with Alana but she treats him as a friend and employer and feels weird about spending all her time with him and his friends. Over time their friendship weathers problems such as the 1973 oil crisis, the failure of the waterbed business and Alana trying to enter showbusiness herself and becoming interested in politics.

This is an oddball film that I found really difficult to get into. For one thing, it feels like it should take place over the course of many years but when I look up the real world timeline, it seems that everything is supposed to take place within a single year. That just doesn’t make sense given what the film wants to do with the development of its characters and the sensation of the passing of time. It’s also chockful of fictionalized versions of many of the colorful personalities of Hollywood from that era including Lucille Ball, William Holden, John Peters and many more. For those unfamiliar with them, and that includes me, you won’t be getting very much out of the film. This production has been called a friends-and-family film as Anderson’s own wife appears in a cameo, Alana Haim who plays Alana has her own real sisters play her character’s sisters, Gary is played by Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman who used to appear in Anderson’s films and so on. It’s unashamedly a film made for the Hollywood crowd who remember that era and mines it for every iota of nostalgia it can get.

Then there’s the question of what we are to make of the relationship between Gary and Alana. As many have pointed out, if the genders were reversed, an older guy trying to pick up a 15-year-old high school girl would be unquestionably a creep. As it is, this is still a deeply uncomfortable relationship. Gary is at times Alana’s employer while she often takes on an elder sister or even a babysitter role for him. They do try to date other people, and Alana especially makes an effort to do so, yet somehow all those other relationships never work out. Anderson’s filmography is admittedly full of other examples of dysfunctional relationships yet here it’s framed in the context of a romantic film. The takeaway for me is that he is saying that this too is part of life and that’s just weird. Note also all of the other creepy characters in this film: Jon Peters who is unapologetically addicted to getting tail in his own words, the Japanese restaurant owner Jerry who speaks in a demeaning accent to his wives and treats them as being interchangeable, and so on. Anderson defends this portrayal as being historically true to the period, yet combined with how nostalgic the film feels, there seems to be a nod of approval in it as well.

This film made it to the top of many critics’ best of lists so there’s clearly no shortage of fans who are into this kind of Hollywood insider navel gazing. For my part, I can appreciate the production values and the craft that went into it, but I have little interest in the setting and I dislike the uncritical eye with which it looks upon all these relationships.