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Licorice Pizza’ Review: California Dreaming and Scheming

In his latest movie, Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the San Fernando Valley for a shaggy 1970s romp about a self-important
teenage boy and a memorable woman.

By Manohla Dargis
Published Nov. 25, 2021 Updated Dec. 3, 2021

Licorice Pizza Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Comedy, Drama, Romance R 2h 13m

GARY

“Licorice Pizza,” a shaggy, fitfully brilliant romp from Paul Thomas Anderson, takes place in a 1973 dream of bared midriffs and
swinging hair, failures and pretenders. It’s set in Encino, a Los Angeles outpost in the shadow of Hollywood and the birthplace of
such films as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Boogie Nights,” Anderson’s 1997 breakout about a striver’s passage into pornographic
stardom. There’s DNA from both old and New Hollywood in “Licorice Pizza,” a coming-of-age romance in which no one grows up.

The film’s improbable teenage hero is Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman), another classic striver. A
child performer who’s hit maximum adolescent awkwardness, Gary is 15 and aging out of his professional niche. He still performs,
but has started to diversify. Yet even as he embraces uncertain new ventures, his faith in himself remains steady, keeping his smile
lit and smooth talk oozing. Deranged optimism and self-importance are American birthrights, and if his confidence weren’t so
poignantly outsized — and if Anderson were in a tougher mood — Gary would be a figure of tragedy rather than of comedy.

Anderson always maintains a level of detachment toward his characters, letting you see their unembellished flaws, both
insignificant and defining. He loves them with the prerogative of any director. But his love for Gary is special, as lavish as that of an
indulgent parent, and his affection for the character is of a piece of the soft nostalgic glow he pumps into “Licorice Pizza,” blunting
its edges and limiting the film’s overall effect. The gap between what you see in Gary and what he sees in himself makes the
character hard to get a handle on, and more interesting. Gary blunders and bluffs, finding success and defeat, fueled by a
braggadocio that, much like one of the earthquake faults running under the city, threatens to bring the whole thing tumbling down at
any moment.

This instability suits the freewheeling, episodic structure, even if Gary wears out his welcome. The film opens on a school picture
day with high-school boys preening in a bathroom and lines of students snaking outside. An amusingly portentous cherry bomb
explodes in a toilet and before long Gary is ogling Alana (Alana Haim, the rock musician), an assistant for a creep who’s taking the
kids’ pictures. The photographer slaps her ass. Gary is more of a romantic. He’s knocked out by Alana, instantly smitten, a
thunderbolt moment that Anderson memorializes with a prodigious tracking shot that gets both the camera and the story’s juices
going. Gary has met the girl he’s going to marry even if she doesn’t know it.

Anderson keeps the camera and characters beautifully flowing through minor and major adventures of varying interest. Most of
these are inaugurated by Gary’s entrepreneurial hustling, which takes him all over the nabe and sometimes beyond. He dips into
bars and restaurants, shops and audition rooms, and belts out a tune in a show where he upstages a cruelly funny stand-in for
Lucille Ball (Christine Ebersole), who threatens to castrate him (not really, but the rage is real). He jousts with his enemy (Skyler
Gisondo), a wee smoothie who slides in like Dean Martin in his cups, which is as sleazy and silly as it sounds. Gary also gets busted,
starts a few businesses, runs from the law and into Alana’s arms, which remain as dependably open as a late-night diner.

LICORICE PIZZA | Official Trailer | MGM Studios

ALANA

“Licorice Pizza” has its seductions, most notably Alana. She’s a fabulous creation, at once down-to-earth real as a friend who grew
up in the Valley and as fantastical as a Hollywood dream girl. When Alana first walks through Gary’s school, Anderson makes sure
to show her in long shot, head to toe, exasperated and slumped, hair and miniskirt gently in sync. This is Haim’s first movie but she
has a seasoned performer’s presence and physical assurance. Her expressive range — her face drains and fills as effortlessly as if
she were handling a water tap — and humanizing lack of vanity are crucial, partly because she’s a delight to watch and because
Hoffman is a frustratingly limited foil.

For reasons that only she knows, Alana agrees to go out with Gary, initiating a relationship that makes no sense but one that
Anderson certainly enjoys. She’s about 10 years older than Gary, maybe more. He’s big for his age and taller than her, and with his
swagger and belly bulging over his belt, you can already see the used car salesman he might one day become. But right now he’s a
kid. “Do you think it’s weird,” Alana asks a friend, while smoking a joint, “that I hang out with Gary and his friends all the time?”
Alana says she thinks it’s weird (it is), but what she believes doesn’t have much bearing on the story and she continually bends to
suit Gary’s needs as well as Anderson’s, which don’t include psychological realism.

Anderson asks a lot of Haim: He makes sure we see her nipples at full mast under her shirt and parades her around in a bikini when
everyone else is dressed. These moments are in line with some of the more flagrantly obnoxious stereotypes that he folds in, just like
a studio hack might have done back in the day while having a witless chuckle. There’s a sycophantic assistant who’s a mincing
cliché, and the white owner of a Japanese restaurant who speaks in broken English. Anderson deploys these stereotypes without
editorializing, which is a commentary on their use, and just enough timing and attention to make it clear that he’s enjoying tweaking
contemporary sensibilities.

These moments are cheap and stupid and add nothing to a movie that throws out a great deal to alternating scattershot and lasered
effect: the OPEC oil crisis, water beds, the silhouette of palm trees against a night sky and the kind of stars who no longer shine
bright. One of the recurrent beats that Anderson hits best in “Licorice Pizza” is what it’s like to live in a company town like Los
Angeles, where everyone is in the business, seems to be, or wants to be, and so keeps hanging on to Hollywood and its promise,
whether it’s Gary or the faded and midlevel stars idling in the neighborhood joint. There, Sean Penn roars in as a old-studio lush as
Tom Waits and other pals grin on the sidelines.

Throughout, Alana keeps fuming and blazing, steadily lighting up Gary and the film as brightly as Fourth of July fireworks, even as
the story slides here and there, and gathers and loses momentum. The movie doesn’t always know what to do with Alana other than
dog after her, and it’s a particular bummer that while Anderson makes her an object of love and lust, he shortchanges her sexual
desire. Alana may be lost, but she isn’t dead, quite the reverse. She’s a woman who’s alive to the world and aware of her own
attraction. But she’s a blank libidinally, as virginal and safe as a teen-comedy heroine. She doesn’t even ask Gary to pleasure her, not
that he would know what to do.

Alana deserves better, dammit! Everyone knows it (OK, not Gary) even the Hollywood producer based on the real Jon Peters (a
sensational Bradley Cooper) knows it. Resplendently fuzzed, a white shirt framing his chest hair, a kilo of coke (probably) up his
nose, Peters appears after Gary starts a water bed company. The business is a long, not especially good story, but Peters, who’s
dating Barbra Streisand, wants a bed and he wants it now. This initiates a tour de force sequence in which Alana, who’s helping Gary
run things, natch, takes the wheel of a monstrous moving truck. She’s a natural, a genius, Streisand, Andretti, a California goddess,
and, as she brakes and slows and goes, Alana gives you a vision of perfection and “Licorice Pizza” the driver it needs.
Licorice Pizza

Rated R for stereotypes, language and teen high jinks. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes. In theaters.

Licorice Pizza
Director Paul Thomas Anderson
Writer Paul Thomas Anderson
Stars Bradley Cooper, Maya Rudolph, Skyler Gisondo, Sean Penn, Alana Haim
Rating R
Running Time 2h 13m
Genres Comedy, Drama, Romance

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New
York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: California Dreaming, and Scheming

Referenced in This Article

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