Paul Thomas Anderson's films aren't exactly a stranger to controversy. The frank and explicit depiction of the seventies porn industry in "Boogie Nights" attracted some sideway glances at the time. As did the subplot in "Magnolia" depicting misogynistic, pick-up-artist seminars. But it's not like anyone was outraged by the content of "Punch-Drunk Love" or "Inherent Vice." Yet Anderson's most recent film has, surprisingly, been his most hotly debated. Not because "Licorice Pizza," a nostalgic hang-out movie loosely inspired by Anderson's own adolescence, is especially graphic or inflammatory. It's because the film revolves around a quasi-romance between a teenage boy and a twenty-five year old woman. This seems like a pretty silly thing to get upset about to me but, now that I've seen the film, I can say it is. Because this film is a lot more than just that.
Gary Valentine is an unusually ambitious fifteen year old boy, growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the early 1970s. While she’s working as a photography assistant at his high school, he meets Alana Kane, a twenty-five year old woman from a large Jewish family. Gary is immediately smitten with Alana and attempts to seduce her. The two form an odd friendship after Gary, who has had a little success as a child actor, asks Alana to accompany him to New York. After returning to the Valley, Gary and Alana start a waterbed business together. This leads them on a number of misadventures together, their different perspectives on the world leading them to get closer and further apart.
Paul Thomas Anderson grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Anderson would take this love for his childhood home and combine it with the memories of former child actor and producer Gary Goetzman to create “Licorice Pizza.” Fitting this backstory, the film is a largely episodic but extremely specific recollection of life in this place and this time. The early seventies fashions, fads, and styles are painstakingly replicates. The interiors of the homes are characterized by mustard yellow wallpaper, wood paneling, and teal phones. High-waisted pants, mini-skirts, garishly colored buttoned-up shirts are the fashion of the day. The cars are all very specific models. Real people and places, like the Cock O’ the Tail restaurant or city councilman candidate Joel Wachs, weave in and out of the story. I never lived through the seventies but “Licorice Pizza” sure made me feel like I was there.
As eager as I am to call “Licorice Pizza” a movie about the early seventies, it is best described as a coming-of-age story about two young people at very different points in their lives. Gary Valentine is an irrepressibly horny fifteen year old boy. He thinks about girls and sex all the time. This might be why he’s eager to grow up, pursuing business opportunities that hover uncomfortably between real self-made jobs and get-rich-quick con schemes. Alana Kane, meanwhile, is in her twenties, unemployed and still living at home. She is still easily charmed by handsome, older men smiling at her. She gets high too often and spends most of her days just hanging out. She’s self-aware enough to ask if it’s weird that she spends so much time with teenagers, but is still desperately trying to find her own place in the world. Here we have a romance between an incredibly immature boy who wants the freedom and power of adulthood and a young woman trying to hold onto the carefree days of her early youth.
The film is definitely aware of the problems that are created between Gary and Alana because of their differences in age. (Making the outrage over the gap in their relationship all the more ridiculous.) And it’s not like the two are ever really dating throughout the movie. Gary thinks Alana is hot and obtainable. Alana is intrigued by the ambitious boy and gets sucked up in his elaborate swindles. Yet she pursues other guys, frequently more outwardly charming or mature men, making Gary feel jealous and impotent. Sometimes, she’ll even intentionally do this shit to make him jealous, showing her own immaturity. They have a flirtatious relationship characterized as much by trivial bickering and petty resentment as mutual curiosity. Any middle ground they find between their different life goals is destined to be short lived. To say “Licorice Pizza” supports the idea of women in their twenties dating teenage boys deliberately ignores that the film repeatedly shows why these two are ultimately not a good fit for each other.
Another relative non-actor was cast in the other lead role of the film. Since 2017, Paul Thomas Anderson has directed nine music videos for the indie pop group Haim. The Haim sisters also grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which allowed them to forge a friendship with Anderson. So it's unsurprising that all of the sisters, along with their mom and dad, would end up in “Licorice Pizza.” Alana Haim, the youngest of the three, stars as Alana. Much like Cooper Hoffman, she also looks like a real person, with imperfect skin and what is described in the film as a “very Jewish nose.” She gives a similarly naturalistic performance, playing an impulsive but conflicted young woman that generates a relaxed, low-key type of sexiness. It's easy to see why Gary would be immediately captivated by her, as she radiates with both an accessible girl-next-door energy and a quirky charm all her own.
Alana, and the movie around her, is also acutely aware of the sexual politics of the 1970s. All throughout the film, Alana catches the attention of various men. Gary is immediately crushed on her. His more traditionally handsome co-star Lance flirts with her the minute he sees her. After trying out acting on her own, Alana meets movie star Jack Holden – based on William Holden – and he's quickly interested in her. Late in the movie, an unhinged Jon Peters aggressively hits on her and touches her. Sometimes, Alana appreciates this attention. She's charmed by Holden and Lance. Sometimes, it disgusts her, as Peters and Gary's repeated request for a hand job do. Each time, Alana finds her actual thoughts and feelings being ignored by men who see her as a means to an end. Holden never remembers her real name and discards her the minute he no longer needs a young woman to hold. Alana is frequently frustrated by Gary's inconsiderate treatment of her. After developing a crush on Joel Wachs, she soon learns he just wants her to be his beard. She's tired of always being a prop in a man's story, instead of being treated like a real human being with a complicated personality. This represents the seventies as a time when sexuality freedom was trumpeted but often at the expense of women's actual feelings. Even the other women in the movie, like a female casting agent, see Alana as something she's not, as merely a reflection of her own experiences.
Stand-out performances like these are paired with some stunning filmmaking. The lengthy Peters episode also includes an incredible sequence where Alana steers a huge truck, totally out of gas, down a steep hill and through traffic that could easily compete with the excitement found in any of last year's best action movies. Anderson includes a number of reoccurring visuals that obliquely illustrates the film's themes. The first are repeated shots of characters reflected in glass or a mirror, often separated from someone by some sort of barrier. Such as when Alana and Gary get a DJ to read an ad for their waterbed store or when Gary gets briefly arrested by cops for no reason at all. This seems represents the adolescent desire to connect, to touch, another person but being held back by other forces. The other visual trademark of the film are repeated tracking shots of people running to someone else, overflowing with youthful energy as they race to be with someone they care about.
If the visuals go a long way to cementing how “Licorice Pizza” thinks and feels, it's soundtrack takes things all the way. Anderson largely scores the film with radio hits and deep cuts from the time and place. The irreverent inhabitants of a Teen Fair – which include the Adam West Batmobile and a cameo of John C. McGinley as Herman Munster – are matched with Sonny and Cher's “But You're Mine,” another irreverent icon of then-contemporary pop culture. The jungle movie drumming of Chico Hamilton's “Blue Sands” provides an uneasy energy to the scene where Gary is arrested. Bowie's elegiac and sweeping “Life on Mars?” provides the right touch to the end of one of Gary's schemes as he moves towards another. While the thumping rock swagger of the Door's “Peace Frog” energizes an earlier moment of people simply packing up. The songs are so vital to the film that there's barely any room for Jonny Greenwood's score, though he does chime in with a beautiful and simple piece of piano-driven music just when the movie's emotions need it.
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