Mark Reviews Movies: LICORICE PIZZA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 18, 2021

It all begins with a dreamy sense of nostalgic romance and romantic nostalgia. The apparent romance of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza features, on one side, Alana Kane (Alana Haim, the musician making a fairly impressive acting debut), who says she's 25—although, at one point, the character lets it slip that she's 28, in a moment of quickly adjusted honesty—and has no idea what she wants to do with her life—only that the thing, whatever it may be, has to be better than the life she has now.

On the other side, there's Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, also making an auspicious acting debut and the son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was an Anderson regular). He's an actor at the start—and throughout, really. Gary's mainly a hustler, latching on to possible trends and trying to make money off them while the opportunity still exists.

He's also 15 years old, a fact that the movie first acknowledges as a solid legal and moral reason for this relationship to veer away from actual romance. After a while, though, Anderson seems to hope that the nostalgia for the good and not-so-good-but-still-kind-of-nifty days of the early 1970s will make us forget or overlook that matter.

Indeed, the entire movie lives within that logic of half-remembered memories, almost certainly exaggerated incidents, and moments in which specific emotions override everything else. If Anderson cared as much about the characters and the story as he does about communicating the far-away feeling of affection for a long-passed time, the movie might have been on to something.

Instead, it exists mostly as a series of adventures—mostly youthful misadventures—and anecdotes and pieces of period trivia. The setting is the San Fernando Valley, where, in general, life is a bit more relaxed than in the city of Los Angeles proper, movie stars can be spotted in the area's regular haunts, and the influence of the bustling metropolis and Hollywood glamour seem to keep everyone dreaming of something better.

Gary is constantly acting on those dreams, as fleeting as the results may be. One of them, after spotting her working with the photography company taking class pictures at his high school, quickly becomes Alana, who has been taking such odd jobs because she clearly has no clue what her career or life will be.

After some playful banter (Anderson uses a pair of long one-takes for that scene, making it feel as immediate as a dream), in which Gary tries to charm her and Alana keeps pointing out he's too young to be anything but a friend, Gary invites Alana to dinner. She shows up, likely because she has nothing better to do.

The rest of the story is about how their relationship becomes tighter, drifts apart, but always seems to return to its old ways. This is basically dictionary-definition co-dependency, but when you're 25 (or 28) or 15, the concept of potentially unhealthy personal connections isn't going to matter as much as the feeling those connections give you.

That relationship is the through line here, as Gary, with his acting career essentially ending after an amusingly awkward audition scene, keeps starting and ending and starting new business opportunities (The screenplay vaguely suggests that the kid's publicist mother, played by Mary Elizabeth Ellis, somehow makes his seemingly endless financial well possible). Meanwhile Alana tags along, gets involved in those enterprises, becomes disillusioned, looks for something beyond Gary, and always finds her way back to him.

In the spirit of the '70s, Gary's ventures include a business selling waterbeds—well, the mattresses, which Alana accurately describes as just "big water balloons"—and an arcade, after learning that the government will make pinball machines legal again. Alana's momentary escapes involve brief encounters with a pair of actors—Lance (Skyler Gisondo), who co-starred with Gary in a movie musical when they were younger, and Old Hollywood legend Jack Holden (Sean Penn), who tries to woo the much-younger Alana and literally leaves her behind trying to re-create his former glory. She also participates in the mayoral election campaign for Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), who makes a lot of optimistic promises amidst the cynicism of the era, even though his personal life becomes defined by that cynicism.

Another real-life figure is Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), a mercurial and womanizing movie producer, currently riding the coattails of his romance with Barbra Streisand. A lengthy adventure—featuring the ticking time bomb of Jon's flooded bedroom, a nationwide oil shortage, and a couple of empty-tanked vehicles—serves as an inspired, comedy-of-errors centerpiece. In a story that revolves around isolated and occasionally over-the-top incidents (Gary, for example, is wrongly arrested for murder at one point), that sequence possesses the biggest impact—not only because of the comedic staging and timing, but also because it finally (as in belatedly and for the last time) gives Alana a chance to take definitive control of matters.

Licorice Pizza is broadly affectionate of the era it's re-creating and these characters, despite how troubled and troublesome they may be. Anderson depends on that feeling to go a long way, but everything surrounding it is so slight that the movie's range is limited.

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