Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 13 minutes
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Quick Impressions:
What I love about Paul Thomas Anderson’s work is that every one of his films is so atmosphere-rich and set in a completely different world from his last movie. Back when Phantom Thread was a Best Picture nominee, I remember watching an interview with costume designer Mark Bridges (and also stars Vicky Krieps and Lesley Manville) and listening to him in awe, turning to my mother (who was making little mince pies in the kitchen) and saying, “My God! I know nothing about this! They’ve built a whole world!”
(Not to brag, but I know nothing about all kinds of stuff!) Only as I was listening to Bridges describe how he’d gone about creating the costumes for the film (about an eccentric, exclusive designer in the 1950s and his mushroom-hunting bride) did I fully comprehend how much work it must take to recreate an entire (niche) world in all its detail, to create such a realistic and immersive experience that the movie audience watching feels that it is real, that we’ve just dropped in for a while.
And the thing is, Anderson does this again and again. That’s so far removed from my experience. In academia, you study one subject, narrowing your focus more and more, becoming an expert on one tiny slice of reality. As a creative writer, I do build worlds, but I tend to hang around in them for multiple books at a time. Even though I write on a variety of subjects, I don’t jump from one to the next the way Anderson does with his films. The amount of study and prep and meticulous research and recreation each one of these movies must take boggles my mind, and then it’s on to the next film.
Now granted, in some ways, the immersive set design is just so much trimming. At its heart, Phantom Thread is a love story. Its trailers make it seem so ominous, and then it delights us (or it delighted my husband and me, anyway) by turning out to be an outside-the-box love story, practically a romantic comedy. (I was surprised by how much I loved that film. I went only because it was Oscar nominated, and I needed to see all the nominees to write about them. I didn’t expect to like it much. But it was so charming, especially the brother/sister dynamic between Daniel Day-Lewis and Lesley Manville, his “old sew-and-sew.” (I love that he calls her that!).)
If you can believe it, Licorice Pizza is an even more immersive experience than Phantom Thread. The way Anderson faithfully recreates the 1970s in this film is almost unbelievable. (Most surprisingly, it’s unobtrusive. You don’t watch and think, “What a faithful recreation.” You just feel like you’re there.) Yet cut away all of the (absolutely fantastic and wholly immersive) 1970s atmosphere, and you’re left with another outside-the-box love story. My husband and I liked it (though I did realize immediately why it’s generating so much controversy. I’ll talk about that at the end of the review).
The Good:
Alana Haim makes a charming leading lady. (Do people use the term “leading lady” anymore? Did I just think of it because I spent the evening in the 1970s?) My husband liked her, too, and was astonished to discover in the end credits that her family is played by her actual family.
“I wondered how they found two women who looked so much like her!” he said. “Did you know those were her sisters?”
“Yeah,” I said, sounding misleadingly knowledgeable on the subject. “They’re HAIM, the band.” (I did not mention that I only know like two of their songs, and that I just found out that I’ve been pronouncing their name wrong for years last week.)
Alana Haim is really good in this role, though. There’s something so natural about her performance. (I wonder if it helps that her character’s name is Alana. I keep thinking of how they changed the name of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s character to Adèle in Blue is the Warmest Color to get candid, natural reactions from the actress. Many lines in this film feel fresh and natural, as if they’ve been improvised, but I’m just speculating.)
I spent most of the movie feeling so sorry for her character. (I kept asking myself, “Would I be able to date someone as young as Gary?” “Would I be able to keep myself from dating someone because he was as young as Gary?” because the burden of keeping the relationship from happening is clearly on her, which doesn’t seem fair. They obviously love each other.)
I find Alana sympathetic, simply because it’s so easy to wander around not knowing where your life is going. Alana puts in so much effort, yet the world continually confounds her. It would be different if she were just unmotivated. But she’s trying so hard to make something happen for herself. And she won’t be with Gary—even though she loves him—because wants to be principled (even though it sometimes ruins her life).
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Haim sneak into Best Actress, although I also wouldn’t be surprised to see that not happen because of the controversy and backlash the age difference of the protagonists is provoking.
Philip Seymour Hoffman was my husband’s favorite actor, and we were devastated when he died so young. So we were excited to see his son Cooper play a leading role in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Hoffman is pretty captivating as Gary. He makes Gary seem like someone we can believe is fifteen, but we can also believe as a love interest for Alana. That’s a tricky balance.
The supporting cast is good, too. I was surprised (and pleased) to see Sean Penn and Tom Waits turn up well into the film. In this movie, Penn seems totally unconcerned with being Sean Penn. He’s very fun as Tom Holden, the star who briefly gets Alana’s attention. And I’ve liked Waits in everything since The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. (I didn’t live in the San Fernando Valley in the 70s. Did people like this routinely show up in restaurants? I lived in El Cajon in the 80s. Dinner out was never so colorful.) (Of course, my grandpa loved to take us all to the Sizzler, so it’s not surprising we didn’t bump into any action stars there.)
I was intrigued to see both Skyler Gisondo and Mary Elizabeth Ellis whom our family liked to watch on the Netflix show Santa Clarita Diet. Christine Ebersole gets a nice moment, and Maya Rudolph turns up (not surprisingly). Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s daughter Sasha is in this movie, too. (There are all kinds of famous people sneaking around in the background. John C. Riley!)
But the best supporting performance belongs to Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters. (I didn’t realize until just now that he’s the same Jon Peters who was married to Lesley Anne Warren with whom I was briefly obsessed in the 80s. Now I’m rethinking what I saw, in terms of the limited information I know about Jon Peters. Interesting. I’ll have to watch the movie again.) Cooper’s performance is something else! Maybe he’ll get an Oscar nomination. (I wouldn’t mind. In fact, I hope he does if Lady Gaga does because that would be entertaining.) But I think Haim gives the standout performance of the film.
Where Licorice Pizza truly excels is set design and costuming. I’ve seen so many movies and shows lately set in the atmosphere rich “pretend 80s.” Watching this, you feel like looking back into the real 1970s. The atmosphere created in this movie is outstanding. Mark Bridges is once again the costume designer. Maybe I’ll get to see another interview with him this year. I hope so. He’s quite well spoken.
The cinematography is good, too. And I’m beginning to feel like I need to start listening to Radiohead more. Perhaps I should be a huge fan, and I just wasn’t ready when I was younger or something. I don’t think Jonny Greenwood has done a film score that I haven’t liked. (But why is he writing the scores to everything this year?) Not surprisingly (for a film named after a record store) the soundtrack is outstanding, too.
As a writer, I find the story so thought-provoking. How did Anderson come up with this? Is it autobiographical to any degree? Or did he just decide, “I’ll write about 1973. I know! I’ll write about the oil embargo. Why would that affect my fifteen-year-old protagonist? Oh! Because he owns a waterbed store!”
This movie made me feel like such a failure at life. I’m 42, still trying to improve at marketing my books (and to convince myself not to pursue three new book ideas when I’m trying to finish writing the last novel of a six-book series). Meanwhile, Gary is in high school, and he has a successful waterbed business! Who does that? How does that happen? He makes it look so easy. He sees a waterbed in the window! Five seconds later he has his own store, and the twenty-five-old he has a crush on has decided to quit her job and work for him full time! Is this due to some kind of privilege so exclusive I don’t even know about it? Was this normal in the greater LA area for fifteen-year-old boys in 1973? I feel so inept. Gary’s got all the answers!
I really do love the way the oil embargo becomes a complication because Gary owns a waterbed store. That’s just very inventive writing. (And maybe this happened to a lot of people in real life? Probably not too many fifteen-year-olds, but…I’ve never researched the trajectory of the waterbed. I’m mildly intrigued now.)
What really gets me is the play on the classic car chase scene. Instead of a high-speed chase, we get a scene where people are chasing and pursuing each other, driven by the fact that everyone keeps running out of gas. (I find the concept very amusing, especially because car chases are such a fixture of 70s movies.)
Licorice Pizza is very easy to watch. And I like it. (Don’t I?) I’m basically at the point of thinking, “This may be my second favorite P.T. Anderson movie ever…if I even like it.” His work often has that effect on me.
I’ve mentioned Phantom Thread several times now. I’m realizing that may be my favorite P.T. Anderson movie. I’ve only seen parts of Boogie Nights (whose are not important). I try so hard to “get” Magnolia. I’ve seen it so many times (especially when you consider that I don’t like it). I disliked it so much the first time, but a friend has such a high opinion of it. Because I respect his judgment, I keep trying again. (And that opening sequence I do like, so that sucks me in, and I think, “Maybe I will like it this time.” It has elements I like. Quiz shows. People who were married to Lauren Bacall. Frogs. I’m due for another tortured re-watch soon. (If I ever end up in Dante’s Inferno, I’ll be forced to watch Magnolia endlessly. I’ll wail, “How is this contrapasso? This isn’t even a clever punishment!” And voiceover narration will explain, “You want things to happen for a reason, eh? You want a clever punishment, eh? Well watch Magnolia for the rest of time for no reason at all!”)
I also have mixed feelings about There Will Be Blood. I love some elements of it and almost hate others. (I do love making milkshake jokes with my husband. That never gets old.) I was so relieved to love The Master. “Finally!” I thought, “I ‘get’ a P.T. Anderson movie! This is great!” And then all the critics were like, “This is the one that’s not good!” And I was so confused! I haven’t seen Inherent Vice.
I think Licorice Pizza is an awful lot like Phantom Thread in that they’re both highly atmospheric, boundary-jumping love stories. I already want to see Licorice Pizza a second time.
Best Scene Visually:
I like the shot composition of the scene when Alana tries to sell waterbeds on the phone. (There’s a lot of layering I find visually interesting). And, of course, the scene is hysterically funny.
Best Action Sequence/Best Scene:
I’ve never seen a chase sequence before driven by the fact that everyone is running out of gas. I love the sequence with Cooper and their van. The idea that they’re running from him, and he’s running toward them (pursuing them for an entirely different reason) is so arresting, and I would love to watch the sequence again and think through the mechanics of it (the character dynamics, the events, the cause/effect relationships).
Most Oscar-Worthy Moment, Alana Haim:
What I love about Haim’s performance is that I feel her frustration every time she sees someone else with Gary, every time she wants to be with Gary and stops herself, every time she throws herself eagerly into a new relationship (or sometimes a new job) and it just blows up completely. At so many moments, I thought, “My life is just like this!”
And it isn’t! I have never been in love with someone ten years younger who was in high school and sold waterbeds. I have never lived in LA, trying to make it as an actress (or aspiring politician). I’m really not much like Alana at all. But emotionally, I related to her in every scene.
Maybe she’s best in the restaurant scene, when she’s having dinner with Sean Penn and making faces at Gary.
The Negatives:
I try so hard to avoid reading anything about movies before seeing them, but I had heard that Licorice Pizza is generating controversy. It’s very easy to see why. (I doubt it’s that Sean Penn doesn’t wear a helmet in his big motorcycle scene, though that’s certainly not very safe. I’m also pretty sure it’s not the ease with which Gary gets his hands on drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol, or that nobody reads him his Miranda rights, though my husband thinks that should have happened in that one scene, even in 1973.)
When the movie starts, Gary is 15, and Alana is 25. You can see why that would raise eyebrows and cause some concern. Ten years is a lot of years. And 15 is very young. By the end of the movie, Gary has turned 16 (maybe more? I wondered if I lost track of time while watching. If not, they sure do get a lot done in one year.)
They’re not your typical fifteen and twenty-five-year-old, though. Alana still lives at home (which was certainly not unheard of. My mom lived at home until she was married at twenty-four in 1977). But she doesn’t seem to have a solid plan for her life at this point. From a certain point of view, she’s still in late adolescence. Gary, meanwhile, is anything but typical for his age. He’s an actor, an entrepreneur.
I don’t know many fifteen-year-olds who own an alternative mattress business. I feel like once you’ve owned and operated a waterbed store together for a few months, you’re basically common law married in California. (That’s not true. But I’m realizing now that I don’t know the age of consent in California in the early 70s. It could have been sixteen. Also, Gary and Alana don’t have sex with each other in this movie. Of course, we don’t know what they’ll do after the movie is over, but it’s possible that they plan to run around. (They do that a lot.) And they’ll probably play some pinball. (Why not?) We don’t really know for sure that their plan is to have sex. Perhaps they plan to live a chaste life. Maybe they’ll enter a Josephite marriage. (I know they won’t. For one thing, Alana is Jewish. For another, they’re going to have sex.)
But listen, they don’t have sex on screen in the film. If Alana felt no qualms because of Gary’s age, and every other scene in Licorice Pizza was a torrid, graphic sex scene, I’d be a lot more concerned about the film. Someone on Twitter just now relayed that someone on Facebook had called Licorice Pizza “a film about a pedophile.” If Gary has gone through puberty, Alana is not a pedophile. At worst, she’s a hebephile. (You know who loves to make that argument? Not technically pedophiles! Still, she’s not a pedophile.) (Also I just checked, and technically, hebephilia applies only when the object of one’s affections is 11-14).
It is a problematic area, though. Watching this, I felt the same qualms (or at least curiosity) I felt watching Moonrise Kingdom. That’s not about pedophilia either, but it is kind of weird to make a movie for adults about two eleven-year-olds experiencing first love, sometimes in their underwear. There’s an uncomfortable element there. Ultimately, I don’t think anything is wrong. (I loved that movie!) But there was enough there to give me pause, and it’s the same type of thing going here.
It’s hard for me not to want people in love to be in love. I’m quite a romantic at heart, honestly. Love is something that can’t be denied. (Well, it can be denied, but only things that do exist can be denied.) This movie makes a very clear case, showing us (again and again) that Alana and Gary are in love with each other and belong together. They fight it (because he’s 15 and she’s 25), but that never makes it any less true. It’s not a matter of should they love each other. They do love each other. It’s not a matter of should they be a couple. They are a couple (whether or not they admit it or consummate their relationship). In the end, since they are in love with each other, they might as well be together.
But there is a slippery slope here. Part of me just assumes that Anderson intends the movie to be provocative and problematic to some degree. I mean, look at all his other movies! (It’s not exactly normal to let someone you love poison you, but I mean, if it works for you and your partner…) I’m sure this movie (with all its attention to detail) took a long time to make. There’s no way that Anderson didn’t realize the entire premise could be considered problematic.
The movie seems to be arguing in favor of the Alana/Gary relationship by showing how ridiculous society’s standards are. For example, 1970s society says it is okay for actors the age of the Sean Penn character to do whatever they like with Alana. And 1970s society says it is okay (preferred, in fact) for gay people to stay in the closet and deny and destroy their romantic relationships.
If those things are okay with society, why court society’s favor? Why not just be with the one you love?
Do I think it’s okay for Alana and Gary (those particular two people) to be in a romantic (even sexual) relationship? Absolutely. But you know, maybe they shouldn’t have made a movie about it because everybody in the whole universe is going to get mad and complain now. If there wasn’t a movie, nobody would know but Alana and Gary, and it would probably be just fine, and if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t know that either.
Now if the genders were flipped, would this upset me more? Probably. It would certainly be more uncomfortable to watch. What’s weird is that Alana doesn’t appear to be grooming Gary. If anything, he seems to be grooming her. Gary is a very unusual person, which truly complicates this a great deal.
I can see how this is going to generate endless controversy because if I wanted to date a teenager, I’d be like, “Hey Licorice Pizza makes a great case for why this is okay.” And then if I were on a crusade against pedophiles, I’d point to that and say, “SEE! I told you! This movie encourages people to date teenagers!”
Would I let my son date a woman ten years older? Well, I’ll tell you, if he’s already got a thriving waterbed business, I don’t think there would any longer be a question of “letting” him do things. How am I going to stop him? That said, if a twenty-three-year-old started dating my almost thirteen-year-old daughter, there wouldn’t be any need to argue if it were morally right. I’d want to save that mental energy for finding a good attorney who could defend me for murdering a twenty-three-year-old. (Just kidding. But if I were serious, I sure wouldn’t make a movie about it!)
[Update, 10:09 pm: After talking with a friend, I realized that I got so distracted by the age difference thing that I failed to touch on just how uncomfortable the scenes featuring Jerry Frick (played by John Michael Higgins) are to watch, and that should be noted. The character makes Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s look culturally sensitive. Granted, the obliviously racist Frick is the butt of the joke, but the scenes are still so cringe-inducing and uncomfortable to watch. From my point of view, the point of these increasingly horrible moments with Frick is to show us (and Alana and Gary) yet another example of a romantic relationship deemed perfectly acceptable by 1970’s society. Frick doesn’t even seem to view his wives as human individuals. They are interchangeable to him, and their language and culture are a cute restaurant theme as far as he’s concerned. Yet by the standards of the day, those marriages are totally okay. So, once again, who cares about the standards of the day? If Gary and Alana love each other, that it what matters, society be damned! But the scenes are really so cringey that I should mention them here. I do think Anderson could have pulled some punches and made the same point.]
The only other thing that bothers me is the film’s title. I know Licorice Pizza is a record store, but they don’t go there, do they? (Are the songs in the soundtrack all from records you could buy at Licorice Pizza? Does some of the action take place very near Licorice Pizza? Does the era simply remind Anderson of Licorice Pizza?) Why is the movie called Licorice Pizza? (It’s possible that I missed something.)
Overall:
I enjoyed watching Licorice Pizza, and I especially liked Alana Haim’s lead performance, the story (somewhat odd in that it’s simple, yet full of bizarre complications), the immersive set design, and costuming, the cinematography, the score, and the soundtrack. (That seems like a lot of stuff. This is probably a very good movie.) I will definitely watch this one again.