As a film title, Licorice Pizza suggests something revolting, a mix of the medicinal tang of anise and the greasy salt of a cheap slice. If that were the intended association of the filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson, it wouldn’t come as a surprise. Over his brilliant, wandering career, Anderson has shown us plenty of scuzz and grime, alongside flashes of kinetic verve and primordial howl. But Licorice Pizza is, by some measure, his most deliberately pleasant film to date. It’s a lively, messy coming-of-age story which turns the clashing elements of that title into reflections of a certain youthful folly and daring, a penchant for base gross-out humor and big, revolutionary thinking. Licorice on pizza? Why not, when you’re young and feeling free?
The film takes place near entirely in the San Fernando Valley of Anderson’s childhood (and, now, adulthood), a sprawl of low houses and fluorescent storefronts—including, once, a record store called Licorice Pizza—proximal to something major (Hollywood, of course) but otherwise as indistinct as any American suburb. Pragmatic modernity became tackiness and now, in Anderson’s loving gaze, nostalgic beauty, the plastic and mundane rendered as jewels underappreciated in their time.
Anderson was only three years old in 1973, when Licorice Pizza takes place. So instead of himself, he focuses on a teenager and a twentysomething. Licorice Pizza’s lead character, precocious actor Gary (Cooper Hoffman), is based on a friend of Anderson’s, who told Anderson wild stories about his days as a child star and, among other things, waterbed entrepreneur. (Really.) Mostly, though, the film feels wholly imagined, a fantasy of a private and strange and industrious world of youth, into which only a few true adults intervene. In that way, Licorice Pizza is oddly (and maybe just faintly) reminiscent of some of Wes Anderson’s work, particularly his childhood adventure Moonrise Kingdom.
Licorice Pizza is flintier than Anderson’s storybook film, though, and runs its hands along rougher textures. A ramble of a movie that occasionally takes the shape of a squicky romance, Licorice Pizza is episodic and erratic. It veers from wood-paneled, genially banal audition rooms to the gloomy mansion of famed hair stylist turned producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper, enjoying himself) to warmly lit restaurants where Gary and his older lady fair, Alana (Alana Haim), play at being grownups.
As the film rattles and swoons along, one starts to get a bit itchy waiting for a real story to come spinning together. It never really does. Anderson is far more concerned with mood and place than he is with narrative. This effectively captures the often aimless jumble of adolescent exploration. But as a followup to the glorious knot-tying of Anderson’s last film, Phantom Thread—which gradually revealed a disarmingly poignant meaning behind all its elusive tailoring—Licorice Pizza’s amorphous discursiveness is a bit of disappointment.
Particular set pieces and vignettes are little marvels, at least. After Gary meets Alana at his school’s picture day, where she is working as an assistant wrangling the pimply teens into the gymnasium, he convinces her to act as his chaperone on a trip to New York City, where he will perform on a variety show with his co-stars from a family film that is a fictional stand-in for Lucille Ball’s Yours, Mine, and Ours. The square lameness of the song and dance routine Gary does on stage is in sweetly embarrassing contrast to the cool hustler pose he so often attempts to strike, a reminder that 15-year-olds are much closer to childhood than they are to anything else, no matter their sudden interest (and access to) the land of maturity.
There’s also a kind of lo-fi action sequence involving a rented moving truck that makes suspenseful fun of simple physics. And there is a longer interlude during which Alana, pushing herself away from all the kiddie scheming of Gary and his gangly friends, goes to work for a political campaign and learns some valuable lessons about the complexities and enduring mysteries of other people’s lives. Growth does happen in Licorice Pizza, which may be enough of a plot for some viewers. But I found myself wishing for a little more cohesion, for some sense of purpose larger than yet another filmmaker journeying to the past to poeticize the squirm, lust, and ambition of being a teenage boy.
As that boy, Hoffman has a natural charm, shaggy and decent even when Gary is doing his unctuous Littlest Businessman routine. Hoffman’s presence in the film is made all the more potent by the fact that he is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, a trusty collaborator of Anderson’s. That Anderson has taken his friend’s son under his wing adds an extra layer of tenderness to the film, a protectiveness and encouragement that suggests Anderson is, maybe, a softie at heart.
His film does have some prickly dimensions, though, chiefly in the quasi-romance between Alana and Gary. What are we to make of this maybe 25-year-old who allows, and perhaps invites, the clumsy seductions of a teenager? Haim, whose bandmate sisters also appear in the film, carefully walks a precarious line, trying to balance Alana’s growing interest with a necessary, managed distance.
The film errantly crosses the line in the end, anyway. As Licorice Pizza builds toward its woozy conclusion, it expands its focus past Gary’s nascent agency and onto Alana’s trickier position—she’s caught between the consequenceless experimentation of teenagehood and the weightier matter of everything after. Licorice Pizza almost becomes her movie. But not quite. Anderson ultimately joins these two together in a way that feels ripe for controversy, intentionally or not.
Maybe he should have left his film with Alana and Alana alone, trusting that Gary, somewhere off-screen, will level out into someone conscientious and kind. She, already tempest-tossed into the brambles of adulthood, may merit a little more of our attention, and more of the film’s bleary approximation of what it is to be stuck in a valley, wondering what might lie beyond all the hazy mountains ahead.
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