Paul Thomas Anderson has structured his new film almost as a series of episodes strung up along the love-hate relationship between the overly charismatic, 15-year-old Gary Valentine (if he were 15 years older, he’d come across as a total creep), and 25(?)-year-old Alana, a strong-willed young woman who works for the company taking yearbook photos at Gary’s high school. The fact that Gary has the guts to ask her out in the film’s first scene, as he waits in line to have his picture taken, alerts us immediately that this is no ordinary kid. Not only does he have more confidence and charm than he has the right to wield—his cockiness actually gets him the date. It’s clear that, while Alana isn’t totally won over by him after their first interaction, she’s certainly taken off guard. Enough so that she actually shows up later that evening to their first “date.” Gary himself can hardly believe it.
This is the beginning of a wild, surprisingly innocent and somewhat absurd love story that takes place between these two mismatched characters over the course of… a couple months? A summer? It’s sort of hard to tell. The film reads like a collection of potentially exaggerated memories pieced together across what feels like a lifetime. And yet, Alana and Gary don’t get any older. And all that they really learn about life is that they both like each other very much. Maybe this doesn’t make them better people, but also, maybe, it does. In a strange way, this movie reminds me of Tarantino’s most recent contribution, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. Or, rather, the experience of watching the former reminded me of watching the latter, in that both films take their viewers backward down a winding road in a large truck with no gas (to evoke Licorice Pizza‘s most wonderfully nerve-racking episode). Put more clearly, each scene is delightfully unpredictable. We may know where these films inevitably lead, but we have no idea how they’ll get there, or what joys await us along the way.
This movie hooks you in (at least, it hooked me in) from the first conversation between its two stars. This first scene is almost good enough on its own that I probably could have left the theatre happy after the first five minutes. It can be a little nerve-wracking walking into a movie when you know that the two leads have never acted on film before. Their performances might come off as wonderfully naive and honest, or conversely, stilted and forced. Luckily for us, Hoffman and Haim deliver the former. The electricity between these two is so fantastically un-fake-able that you almost wonder how Anderson could have gotten so lucky. It might be an overused term, but it’s exceptionally refreshing and sort of beautiful to watch these two perform together. It’s like seeing something brand new—like watching a space shuttle land on the moon for the first time—and you feel kind of privileged to see it. This is a testament both to their acting and to Anderson’s directing. But that’s not all, folks! The movie is full of great performances—from the frighteningly hilarious Bradley Cooper, to Gary’s almost silent kid-brother, to Alana’s Jewish-atheist actor boyfriend (Skyler Gisondo). This film has an excruciatingly talented supporting cast. But it’s still that connection between Gary and Alana that makes it impossible to look away.
That said, PTA walks a delicate border in this film. The age gap between Gary and Alana places their relationship in somewhat uncomfortable territory. Gary is underage. But Alana doesn’t come across as predatory—rather, she begins reverting to a teenage state despite herself, the more time she spends with Gary. She’s still living at home with her family, working a job she doesn’t care about. She’s a little lost despite coming across as self-assured. Gary, on the other hand, seems to know everything. After his first conversation with Alana, he tells his brother, “I met the girl I’m going to marry.” He gets by mainly on his confidence because, as Alana makes clear to him, he isn’t cool. He’s a dork going through an awkward phase; a child actor who has grown up and no longer fits the type he goes to casting calls for. Still, he’s a bit of a player—he woos the flight attendant on a plane to New York, and later a girl from his high school at the grand opening of his waterbed store. Yet, he has a puppy-like jealousy when it comes to Alana. And she gets jealous, too, when Gary shows attention to other girls. As stated above, however, their back-and-forth remains mainly innocent—not sinister. In one scene, when Gary and Alana lie down together on one of Gary’s water beds, and Alana drifts off to sleep, Gary contemplates—or perhaps just fantasizes about—touching her. And yet, the only thing they touch in this moment are pinkie fingers: arguably the most innocent of all appendages. During an earlier scene, Alana frustratedly shows Gary her boobs–a moment played to comedic effect. When they do finally kiss at the end of the film, it’s such a great payoff because the entire movie builds up to this one moment. It’s fantastic and somewhat surprising that Anderson manages to revitalize a simple kiss as the ultimate triumphant expression of affection. There’s an almost elementary school quality to it—sweet and fairy-tale-like in its purity. For a film filled with creepy men preying on young women—in an uncomfortable albeit often ridiculous and largely unthreatening way—this film has surprisingly little sex. Things are said, but very little is shown. There’s nothing graphic. The relationship between Gary and Alana veers toward problematic but never fully gets there. There’s something childish but at the same time quite grown-up about their relationship. They play games, but they always come back to one another.
One of the film’s greatest weaknesses lies in a twice-recurring gag that features John Michael Higgins and his Japanese wife (or rather wives) as the owners of a Japanese restaurant in town. I struggle to understand the necessity of these scenes. The joke feels outdated/out of touch, and easily replaceable by a less offensive bit. The white man undoubtedly serves as the butt of the joke in these scenes–demonstrating his blatant ignorance as he speaks to his wife in English, with a Japanese “accent”–but still, these jokes happen at the expense of the Asian characters’ comfort. Yes, the film takes place in the 70s, but that doesn’t mean we should approach the filmmaking and screenwriting with a 70s-acceptable sense of humor. The fact that these jokes feature two of the very few semi-significant people of color in the movie makes these scenes feel especially insensitive. Perhaps Anderson is striving to present a critique of this era, and of the people he grew up surrounded by. Still, the racial commentary feels very out-of-step with the rest of the film, and probably could have easily been cut, or otherwise rewritten.
Perhaps this critique sounds a little double-standardy, considering the amount of sexist humor in the movie. Once again, the men serve as the butt of these jokes and come across as complete morons, and the woman is never very seriously in a dangerous position. Still, it’s very difficult to walk the line between funny and offensive. When a movie is written and directed by a straight white man, it’s especially hard to ignore these kinds of jokes and themes and to determine whether they’re treated with the appropriate amount of empathy. There’s no good answer to what a person is and is not allowed to do or say in a movie. Usually, we just have to trust a gut feeling.
Rooted along the way in true events–like the 70s energy crisis, or the legalization of pinball–the film nonetheless maintains a dreamlike quality that inclines me to avoid taking it too seriously. Is this movie just Anderson fulfilling some childhood fantasy? Very possibly, but only partially. And anyway, isn’t that the point of most movies these days? After all, if we can’t actually be superheroes, at least we can watch them on an IMAX screen. Licorice Pizza is, essentially, a fantasy. But the difference between any random teenaged boy’s crush on his baby-sister and this film is that it’s extremely well-executed, undeniably unique, and pretty dang endearing. Anderson takes a story that we’ve seen a million times in a million (not-so) different ways—boy meets girl, will they/won’t they—and makes it fresh and engaging. And if there’s one thing we should never take for granted in a movie, it’s the ability to actually hold an audience’s interest. There’s almost nothing I value more than the feeling of relief that washes over me when I sit down in a theatre, and the movie begins to play, and I’m immediately drawn in. I can let go of that fear that I’ll have to spend the next two hours on edge, or just bored. There’s nothing more satisfying than a movie that shows us something new and entertaining, but also meaningful.
In a way, both Gary and Alana are pretending. Gary is pretending to be grown-up, while Alana is pretending not to be. Spending time with Gary makes Alana realize that she has to make a change. She believes that she needs to get away from him in order to do that. In the end, when she comes back to him, does this mean that she’s giving in, or realizing that there’s something different at stake than she initially thought? To draw an odd comparison, the characters in La La Land (2016) separate in order to pursue their careers. The ideal “what-if” scenario of their relationship plays out in a fantasy musical sequence near the end of the film. Does Anderson’s movie present us with the real world or the perfect world version of Alana and Gary’s relationship? Is it actually possible for them to live happily ever after? The final scene of the movie, when the two characters kiss and Alana tells Gary she loves him, seems almost to exist outside of reality–or perhaps only inside Gary’s imagination. Alana may very well love Gary, but is she in love with him? PTA loves complicating a happy ending (take Phantom Thread as an example). But are we actually meant to believe that Alana and Gary will run off to live out some strange clandestine romance? Of course not–the kiss is as far as the fantasy goes. We’re meant to enjoy the journey, not so much the destination, as they say.
For a film that won’t please everybody, Licorice Pizza undeniably accomplishes something rare and exciting that we don’t often see. It’s funny and odd, and above all, magical. Don’t tune in to watch “Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie,” or to see if Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son can act, (though the film doesn’t disappoint on either count). Instead, come out to see Licorice Pizza simply because you’ve never seen something like it before, and perhaps never will again.
Celluloid Thread 