"Licorice Pizza" review — PTA's personal, meandering drama among the year's best
“Do you like peanut butter sandwiches?”
This film is featured in my Best Films of 2021 list.
Gary Valentine and Alana Kane meet rather by accident in the line-up on picture day of Gary’s sophomore year of high school. Gary, the 15-year-old child actor and entrepreneur, is a charmer. He’s immediately struck by the young woman and sets out with all of the brashness of a teenage boy to woo her. He starts by establishing his resume. He name-drops his many screen credits and mentions his successful public relations firm. He’s trying to sweet-talk her into meeting him for dinner that night. Alana, the 25-year-old assistant to the photography crew, is obviously hesitant. She’s taken aback by Gary’s gall and offers him corrections on his technique. But Alana can’t help but become incredibly fascinated by the boy who thinks of himself much older than he is. She agrees to dinner but stresses that it’s not a date. Gary is too high on his success to care.
Alana and Gary start a complicated friendship as they move from one of Gary’s strange business ventures to the next, then into Alana’s hopeful career as an actress and time as a political assistant. The pair are inseparable, but very quickly realize that their lives aren’t as compatible as they want to think. Gary lacks an adult perspective about the world and is far too insular about his own experiences. Alana is too disenfranchised with the world to give herself over to Gary’s naivety. Things get messy between the two as the film charts the highs and lows of their friendship.
Licorice Pizza, his ninth feature film, is writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s most personal project to date. The acclaimed director behind There Will Be Blood (2007) and Phantom Thread (2017), among many other notable films, returns to his childhood hometown for a tale of romance, misadventure, and fledgling identity in his answer to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Licorice Pizza is a beautiful film. The 70s-set coming-of-age comedy-drama effortlessly glides through history with the rose-coloured glasses of childhood. It’s soft, quiet, and relatively low-key compared to Anderson’s other films, but the film radiates love and passion with as much style as ever.
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| Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza. © Metro Goldwin-Mayer. |
Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim, both in their feature-film acting debuts, are Licorice Pizza’s incredible leads. Hoffman — the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, a frequent collaborator with Anderson — plays Gary, the precocious teenager who can’t wait to get his life started. He thinks he’s just about ready for adulthood. He parrots the talk of men much older than him trying to impress his potential business partners and clients. He’s an actor, then a waterbed salesman, then an arcade owner. Gary is going to rule the San Fernando Valley one day. Haim — a member of the pop-rock band Haim along with her two sisters — plays Alana and she couldn’t be more different from Gary. She’s the youngest daughter of a suburban Jewish family who is constantly eclipsed by her older sisters. She has no respectable job, no education, and no passion. The only thing Alana wants to do is flee Los Angeles, but she has no way of leaving. Hoffman and Haim are phenomenal together with their naturalistic, raw performances. I find it hard to believe their mutual acting inexperience because of how brilliant they are in front of the camera.
The rest of the cast is a hodgepodge of Anderson’s personal friends and a smattering of major stars in small roles. Maya Rudolph, Anderson’s wife and well-established comedian known for her parts on SNL and The Good Place, makes a small appearance as Gale, a casting agent. His children appear in cameos throughout the film. John C. Riley, another collaborator with PTA, appears in a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo as a version of Herman Munster. The most notable inclusion to the ensemble is the casting of the rest of the Haim family — Haim’s sisters and bandmates Este and Danielle and parents Moti and Donna — as Alana’s fictional family.
The film relegates its notable actors to small — usually somewhere between one to three scenes — but incredibly memorable parts. Bradley Cooper steals the show as a fictionalized version of Jon Peters, a real-life film producer and hairdresser. Cooper is chaotic and unhinged as he jumps between threats to Gary and his family and causes small amounts of public mayhem at a gas station. Sean Penn plays failing actor and daredevil Jack Holden, a character based on actor William Holden, and Tom Waits plays Rex Blau, his long-time friend and enabler of his antics. Christine Ebersole plays the vicious and ageing actress Lucy Doolittle, based on the later years of I Love Lucy-star Lucille Ball (the second fictionalized version of Ball this year after the biopic Being the Ricardos). Rounding out the cast in the terrific and heartbreaking Benny Safdie, one half of the directorial-duo behind Uncut Gems (2019), who plays LA city councillor and mayoral candidate Joel Wachs who finds himself caught between his duty to the city and his commitments to his partner.
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| Alana Haim and Sean Penn as Licorice Pizza. © Metro Goldwin-Mayer. |
Licorice Pizza is a relaxed, nostalgic movie. It ebbs and flows through a series of smaller anecdotes marking the everyday highs and lows of Gary and Alana’s relationship. The film, Anderson’s funniest work yet, moves from one circumstance to the next often never returning to the stand-out supporting characters. Anderson’s direction is as fantastic as ever and doesn’t let the nature of the film slow his sensibilities as a filmmaker. Licorice Pizza proves how excellent of a director PTA is. The premise of the film in the hands of a lesser filmmaker could result in a film that is purposeless and directionless. But Anderson’s clever script keeps the film alive for the entire run.
The film is captured with gorgeous specificity and rich colouring with its grainy, film photography. Anderson serves as co-cinematographer of the film along with gaffer Michael Bauman in his debut as a cinematographer. The shots are full of texture and energy providing the film with the visual energy it needs for its quiet, slow-moving plot to succeed. The score is composed by Jonny Greenwood, a man well spoken of by this writer, following up on his scores for Spencer and The Power of the Dog, two of the best movies of the year.
I looked up the meaning of the film’s title after I came home from my screening. Licorice Pizza is the name of a chain of record stores exclusive to the Los Angeles area that began in the 70s. “If there’s two words that make me kind of have a Pavlovian response and memory of being a child and running around, it’s ‘licorice’ and ‘pizza,’” Anderson said about the film’s title in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. It’s that specificity and dedication to its era and place that gives Licorice Pizza its distinctive charm. Licorice Pizza is an intimate, subtle joy. The film finds itself in the tension between childhood and adulthood. Gary is the one who’s done with his youth and wants to move on. Alana has come to the revelation that she’s wasted her best years and it's too late to do anything with her life anymore. It’s the ten-year difference between “I have my whole life ahead of me” and “I’ve wasted my entire life.” It’s passionate, personal, and is destined to grow on the viewer with time.
Score: 4.5
Licorice Pizza is now playing in theatres.
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