“Licorice Pizza” - Film Review
There’s a lackadaisical feeling that runs throughout writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. It feels like summer, where there’s nothing in the world but time and friends to spend it with. With a loose narrative and a long run time, Licorice Pizza has moments of magic. It’s a perfect snapshot of wasting lazy, hazy, eternal summer days with your best friends and the crazy ideas you cook up together. Getting to see it on 70mm really adds to this dreamy ambiance.
Licorice Pizza is about the grand get-rich-quick schemes of Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman). He’s a teenage child star who’s out-growing the cute kid roles he used to book in his sleep. Now he’s getting asked to read for acne commercials, but his youthful charm doesn’t fit anymore. On school picture day, he meets Alana Kane (Alana Haim) and he uses every ounce of his charm to get her to agree to go to dinner with him. She’s adamant it’s not a date, he’s adamant it is. There’s no real use in trying to explain the rest of the plot because it takes so many twists and turns through the Valley, but the journey involves water beds, pinball machines, and an eleventh-hour mayoral race.
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Hoffman and Haim are delights, carrying this meandering story on their backs. From the first scene, their bickering is grounding. There’s chemistry between the two of them, and it’s a chemistry I was hoping would not turn romantic, given the age difference. In the film, Hoffman’s Gary is fifteen and Haim’s Alana is twenty-five…maybe. Every time someone asks Alana’s age, she hesitates, then responds with what she thinks would sound best in the situation. To Gary, she’s twenty-five. To celebrity Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), she’s twenty-eight. The only real clue the audience has to her actual age is a high school friend who gets her a job volunteering at a councilman’s election headquarters. He’s clearly in his late twenties.
The central relationship of this movie is between a teenager and a woman in her mid-to-late twenties. Gary has made his crush on Alana evident since their first meeting. He even tells his brother that he’s met the girl he’s going to marry. Alana, at first, repeatedly tells Gary that she’s too old for him and they will never have a relationship, but she’s clearly flattered by his attention. She’s the youngest in her family and feels like she’s stuck in the town she grew up in. She’s working at a company that takes yearbook photos and is looking for any ticket out. Part of the reason Alana hangs out with Gary in the first place is because she senses that she could use his infatuation to get out of Encino.
As the movie progresses, their relationship turns romantic and we see the familiar beats of couples in romance movies. There are lingering shots of them staring into each other’s eyes, tentative attempts at hand holding, and the inevitable fracture. Their reunion is shot like the end of a Hallmark movie, with Gary and Alana sprinting down several city blocks before (literally) running into each other and ending the movie with a kiss.
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Throughout the film, Alana talks with her sister (Danielle Haim) about how it’s weird that she spends all her time with a fifteen-year-old kid. Their romantic get-together is uncomfortable, seemingly only existing as wish fulfillment for teenage boys. It was a disappointing choice that negatively colored the rest of the movie. What could have been a charming romp through 1970s Encino (a time and place clearly close to Anderson’s heart) instead left a bad taste. The relationship could have stayed platonic and been the sort of unlikely friendship that makes for great movies. The foundation is there. Gary is fifteen and has already figured out a career for himself. He’s an actor, he’s an entrepreneur, he’s sure of the path he wants to take in life. Alana is twenty-five and knows nothing about what she wants to do. The two opposites play off each other perfectly, and that dynamic, especially given the age difference, did not need to turn romantic.
Due to the lack of tight plotting, the movie can feel a bit like a series of vignettes stitched together. That, in itself, is not a bad thing. However, a lot of scenes and extraneous storylines could not prove their worth or were flat-out uncalled for. In particular, one repeated interaction sticks out. Gary’s mother runs a PR company and is hired to write a newspaper ad for a newly opened Japanese restaurant. Sitting across from her in her office are a white man and an Asian woman. After hearing the ad read aloud, the man turns to his wife and speaks English, but in a racist caricature of an Asian accent. The intended joke was probably supposed to show how obtuse his character is, but sitting in a theatre that roared with laughter during this scene and a similar one was not comfortable. In the second scene, he has a new wife (a different Asian woman), reducing both of these women’s roles to punchlines of jokes that didn’t need to be told.
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Licorice Pizza has a revolving door of outlandish characters. Bradley Cooper and Sean Penn play eccentric actors. Tom Waits is clearly having a blast as a drunk director. Skyler Gisondo (a Booksmart standout) gets to briefly shine as a fellow child-actor turned-teenage-actor. Even Alana Haim’s real-life family has a ball playing her fictional family. The problem is with the lack of growth of the two leads. A movie doesn’t have to follow a three-act structure to be successful, but the audience at least needs to see progress in some way. At the end of the movie, Gary is the same person he was at the beginning. Alana has fits and starts of exhibiting growth, but they’re sidelined so she can fit neatly in Gary’s idealized version of her. The better story, that we see glimpses of, is Alana realizing there’s a much bigger world outside of Encino. The oil crisis inspires her to work on Councilman Joel Wachs’ (Benny Safdie) mayoral race because she believes he’s going to make a difference. To give her this growth and then tamp it back down so that she can end up with a fifteen-year-old boy is a frustrating use of her character.
As expected, Jonny Greenwood’s score was gorgeous. The soundtrack felt seamless, never overpowering or stealing the focus. The costumes and the attention to detail in the recreation of the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s show that this movie was a labor of love for Anderson. It’s impossible not to feel the warmth of how much this movie, and the time, place, and people it represents, means to Anderson. That love, though, does not excuse some of the choices he made.
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