‘Licorice Pizza’ Is An Awkward Love Story Because Love Is Awkward
Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie is a slice of ’70s life
Alana is a 25-year-old woman trapped in the sprawling, sun-smothered suburbs of the San Fernando Valley circa 1973. The county of Los Angeles has two faces, one plastic surgery smooth and the other a topographical map of blemishes, one wet with spray from the Pacific Ocean, the other hot and dry because there’s nothing but desert over the hills.
The Valley is a dimension where you either know someone who knows someone in Hollywood, or you’re a nobody who knows nobody. That’s Alana, adrift, unhappy, working a dead-end job escorting teenagers to their yearbook headshots while enduring slaps on the ass by her boss, the yearbook photographer.
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s breathless new romantic comedy Licorice Pizza, purgatory is populated by terrible adult men and one woman who maybe isn’t honest about her age, but who is in La-La Land? Alana is uncomfortable in her skin, and there is no shortage of old men who would be happy to unzip her.
Take Jack Holden, an aging superstar played by aging superstar Sean Penn, a character more or less based on legendary actor and boozehound William Holden. Jack is lost in the fog of his own greatness, a reckless soon-to-be has-been who has no business liquoring up a naive wannabe who is decades younger. He is a greasy, grinning old tomcat, but at least Alana is using him to make someone else jealous. Someone special.
As Alana, Alana Haim is a furious slinky. The youngest member of the rock band HAIM, this is her film debut, and she is the soul of this story of misfits who don’t fit in, fitting in. Haim fills the screen with raw vulnerability and ferocity. She’s a star.
The engine that drives the plot of Licorice Pizza is an inappropriate relationship, specifically, the intense, explosive, intimate, frustrating, entirely platonic friendship/marriage between Alana and Gary, a fast-talking 15-year-old hustler with a heart of gold.
He’s a kid with a vision and from the moment he sees Alana on his way to have his yearbook picture taken, he is determined to seduce, befriend, and love her forever and ever.
Yes, Gary is a boy, and Alana is ten years or so older. He’s also the nicest guy in the Valley, and it’s not like she has anything going on. So she joins him in his adventures. Gary is a bullshitter but also a budding entrepreneur and, thanks to his mother’s job in restaurant PR, a real man about town. The power dynamic in the relationship is flipped, too, because Gary is the brains of his own operation, and Alana is playing catch up.
Like Jack Holden, Gary is also an actor aging out of Hollywood: during an audition, it is clear that the casting directors aren’t that interested in a chubby, pimply teen boy. But he’s able to talk Alana into chaperoning him on a trip to New York City to appear on a talk show with a cast of other kids and a mummified star with a hair-trigger temper.
At first, Gary tries to mentor Alana in “the industry,” which is local shorthand for the vast, inane entertainment business. In one scene, an agent comments on how Alana’s “Jewish nose” is suddenly fashionable, like a new kind of purse. The agent is oblivious, of course. It’s easier to be cruel that way.
The pair eventually agree to become business partners.
Gary is played by Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, a sorely missed talent who did such incredible work for Anderson in movies like Boogie Nights and especially, The Master, which is, for lack of a better term, a masterpiece. Hoffman glows with confidence and insecurity, he’s magnetic, and there isn’t a false note in his performance. His Gary is brilliant and also a hormonal brat with real creep potential.
Will Gary grow up to become Jack Holden, or Jon Peters, Barbara Streisand’s lunatic, womanizing boyfriend or John Michael Higgins' character, a racist client of Gary’s mom who runs a Japanese restaurant staffed by white women dressed up as geishas that he runs with his Japanese wives (he divorces one off-screen) both of whom he communicates with using an outlandishly offensive Asian accent? Only time, and probably cocaine, will tell.
These two never consummate their relationship but the sexual chemistry is palpable and, somehow, innocent. In Licorice Pizza, our two geeky heroes are always running — running after cars, running through fields, running down sidewalks — running towards each other, spinning pinballs at full speed, and it is only inevitable that they crash into each other, eventually. There is only forward momentum.
And it’s not like Alana is perfect. She briefly finds herself in the adult world, working on the mayoral campaign for a handsome, idealistic young politician. It is during these scenes that her immaturity and naivete are fully revealed. She can’t connect with a nice guy her age when given the chance.
The movie is more than a standard rom-com, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s also a rambling hangout slice of life in the tradition of Robert Altman or, later, Richard Linklater, whose Dazed and Confused is another meandering look at a generation that didn’t want to do much. I can’t imagine Gary fitting into that particular stoner world, though, because the dude has plans and someone he is desperate to share them with. They’re the perfect team: Gary is a born salesman, and Alana can steer a giant truck with an empty tank backward downhill in what I think is one of the best low-key action scenes of the year.
Licorice Pizza is set during the 1970s, a looser era with fewer rules than today, a decade when America, exhausted by war and political turmoil, laid down on a waterbed and just floated. It was a time of self-medication and smooth jams, and falling in love seemed a little easier and they call it “falling in love” because sometimes love is an open manhole, and no one is there to warn you to watch your step.
This movie isn’t about tidy moral messages, but there is one point Anderson wants to make: love is awkward as hell. There is no right time to fall in love. There is no perfect person. It might not work out. Sometimes “happily ever after” is a summer. Run towards what you want, stumble if you have to, but run, sweat, and don’t look back. Be with the human you most want to be with in whatever way you can. Build something with them. Plot. Laugh. Dream. Catch your breath.
- I’d like you to consider supporting my work here on Humungus. Click this link, and become a Medium Member. I get half of your monthly fee, and that will keep me writing about politics, pop culture, masculinity, and my many feelings.
- Look, no pressure. If you’d like to get stories of mine emailed to you, click this link.