Image courtesy of The Williams Records
Paul Thomas Anderson’s renown lies largely in his consistency. After decades of filmmaking, Anderson continues to feature flawed characters seeking fame, fortune, and love in suburban Southern California. His directorial works include Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and most recently, Licorice Pizza, which is nominated for three Oscars. In Licorice Pizza, Anderson returns predictably — though not disappointingly — to the San Fernando Valley to chronicle two entangled stories of shaping up and striking out.
When the film opens, fifteen-year old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) is waiting in line to have his school picture taken. He becomes enamored with Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a young woman employed by the photographer. She scoffs at Gary’s advances, but entertains his attention nonetheless. Any potential cuteness in this meet-cute is cut by the realization that a decade-long age gap separates the characters. What Gary lacks in years, he overcompensates for in ambition and self-assurance. Alana, though older, is nearly as immature, living at home with no professional or romantic prospects to speak of. Both characters aspire to careers in Hollywood, but their dreams remain unrealized. Licorice Pizza spans three years, across which the pair alternate between feuding and flirtation. Attempts to demonstrate their affection are often awkward and occasionally endearing, but mostly misplaced.
The time Alana and Gary spend together throughout Licorice Pizza is colored by a disconcerting distribution of power. The imbalance goes both ways — Alana’s age grants her an upper hand, while Gary is similarly advantaged by his gender. Early in the film, Alana acts as a chaperone for Gary and is later tasked with driving around his band of pubescent pals, a trope that Anderson recalls from his own Californian childhood. In a recent interview for The New Yorker, he describes nagging older sisters and their friends for rides. The ability to drive is a familiar rite of passage, as indicative of adulthood as a person’s eighteenth birthday.
In fact, is the privilege of a license that allows for Licorice Pizza’s most memorable scene. Gary’s waterbed business scheme has taken off, and the characters are delivering a product to the home of a customer (played by Bradley Cooper). Somewhere on the route home, the crew’s bulky delivery truck runs out of gas. At this point, audiences have grown accustomed to Gary and Alana’s bickering, but Gary’s nagging from the shotgun seat is increasingly irritating. As dusk sets in, Alana skillfully navigates the vehicle backwards down a winding hill, miraculously delivering the truck to the fluorescent-lit safety of a gas station after several minutes of trepidation. There is more dramatic tension in this scene than there is romantic tension between the leads. Alana and Gary's dynamic — instability, tenderness, and all — is on full display, but most importantly, Alana is in control.
Elsewhere in the film, however, Gary is in the driver’s seat. He is Alana’s agent when she attends a casting call and her boss when they begin a business venture together. In these moments, Gary’s gender outranks his age. Despite her seniority, Alana has much growing up to do, and Gary, with his untempered masculinity, is convinced that he can show her how.
The fact that Anderson would have been a mere three years old at the time the movie is set is beside the point. The film is an amalgamation of anecdotes — nostalgic locations, references, and moments from his early career and experiences. The use of 35-millimeter film recalls a far-off time and place. Anderson carefully recreates now-non-existent restaurants and seamlessly inserts the 1970s energy crisis into the storyline. Sentimentality seeps into every shot, yet it is exactly what makes this movie feel inaccessible. Licorice Pizza is, essentially, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1970s Southern California wet dream. It feels as if the movie was not made for anyone but the director’s benefit.
Anderson may have been writing with the 1970s in mind, but when Licorice Pizza debuted in 2021, several moments sanctioned a cringe rather than laugh. At one point, a local restaurateur speaks to a rotation of Japanese wives in over-articulated, fractured English and requires white waitresses to dress in kimonos.
Notably, the film does not pass the Bechdel Test, which evaluates media for its treatment of female characters. Criteria include whether there is more than one named female character and whether these women speak to one another about a topic that is not men. Alana herself is multifaceted; that much is obvious to viewers. And as they navigate friendship, platonic partnership, and eventually, a romantic relationship, Alana and Gary’s conversations are not without nuance. Yet when Alana talks to other women, her dynamism deflates. Her personality is lost to laments about Gary, his behavior, his friends, or his treatment of her.
Whatever limitations were written into the leading female role are overcome by Alana Haim’s impressive acting debut. Alongside Haim, Cooper Hoffman’s performance as Gary is uncaptivating. Like his fictional counterpart at the end of the film, Hoffman is only eighteen years old. He succeeds at playing a kid feigning worldliness, but it is hard not to wonder if that is in large part attributable to Hoffman’s real-life status as a teenager.
Sorting Licorice Pizza into a single genre is a tricky task. It is set in the 1970s, but certainly not a period piece. It has dramatic moments, but isn’t a full-fledged drama. Romance is on the table, but negated by the awkward age difference between Gary and Alana. Anderson’s uncreative reliance upon stereotypes makes comedy a reluctant label, much less the romantic-comedy hybrid. What viewers are left with, then, is the concession that Licorice Pizza is a coming-of-age tale.
There is one major element missing from Anderson’s addition to the genre, however. The coming of age is most often an act of defiance. Members of the Breakfast Club defy their school-sanctioned detention, Ladybird is resentful of her mother, and Mid90s’ rat pack resists the mainstream. Yet such antagonizers do not emerge in Licorice Pizza. Anderson has gone to great lengths to construct relatable human characters, but the cinematic world in which they exist is unrelatable.
Alana is not the indignant teenager typical of the coming-of-age genre, but she is, at times, unpredictably angsty, disagrees with her parents, and spends the film trying on identities, à la adolescence. In Licorice Pizza, Alana’s transition into adulthood is subtle. Anderson sporadically teases the possibility of romance with other characters and, for a period, Alana tries her hand working for a political campaign. Yet every path — professional, romantic, or otherwise — leads her back to Gary.
Alana and Gary finally couple up after two hours of will-they-won’t-they antics, yet the moment feels more trite than triumphant. Alana, nearly thirty years old, succumbs to an adolescent’s incessant pursuit of her. The pair share a single on-screen kiss, a decision that feels suspiciously strategic and unromantic. In the film, Gary has just turned eighteen, shed his status as a minor, and entered adulthood — he has, at least literally, come of age.