Josh Reviews Licorice Pizza

Licorice Pizza, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, The Master, Inherent Vice), is set in 1973 in the San Fernando Valley.  When the film opens, we see a line of kids waiting to take their school picture.  Among them is 15 year-old Gary Valentine, a confident, fast-talking young man who’s had some small success as a child actor.  Gary strikes up a conversation with Alana, the 25 year-old young woman who’s assisting the photographer and offering a mirror to any of the kids who want.  Thus begins the strange, intense, twisty-turny relationship between Gary and Alana.  The film follows the ups and downs in their friendship, their maybe-romance, and the various business ventures and (mis)adventures that they get up to together.

Licorice Pizza is a gloriously weird film.  I hooked into it right away.  (It took a few minutes, as the film drops you right into the story and at first I wasn’t sure where we were, what was going on, who these kids were, and what their relationship was to one another.  But then it snapped in: oh, OK, Gary is a student and this school and Alana is working for the photographer taking the pictures.  Once I had that, I was on-board and off to the races.)  I found the film to be hilarious and deeply moving.  A lot of weird and crazy things happen during the film.  There were times when I questioned the reality of what we were seeing.  (Does Gary EVER go to school??  Does no one ever question his hanging out at the bar at the Tail O’ the Cock restaurant?)  But I loved the weirdness of the film!  I was deeply hooked into the characters, and I laughed a lot as the story unfolded.

The film is a very specific love-letter to this place (the Valley) and time (1973).  I don’t have any nostalgic connection to growing up outside of LA, but I loved how well the film was able to capture the nostalgic strangeness of that world.  It’s fascinating to see what life was like for kids growing up in such close proximity to Hollywood, and all of the strangeness that would entail.  Reading about the film afterwards, I was surprised by how many real events and characters were woven into the film.  (Gary is based on Paul Thomas Anderson’s friend Gary Goetzman, the co-founder of Tom Hanks’ production company, Playtone, who was apparently a child actor who toured with Lucille Ball, and who also sold waterbeds for a time.  Joel Wachs was a real person who ran for mayor in 1973 and who came out as gay in 1999.  The Tail O’ the Cock was a real restaurant.  And, of course, hairdresser-turned-movie-producer Jon Peters — played by Bradley Cooper in the film — really did date Barbara Streisand for a while!)  (That last one I actually knew about.)

There are a lot of great performances in Licorice Pizza, but the film belongs to Alana Haim, who plays Alana.  I cannot believe this is Ms. Haim’s first acting role.  She is extraordinary in the film; this is a star-is-born type of performance that comes along oh-so-rarely.  Ms. Haim commands the screen.  She brings so many layers of nuance to Alana; she allows us to see so much of what Alana is thinking and feeling through her face and her eyes.  She’s the star of the movie, and yet I still wish we got more of her playing this character.  I wanted to learn even more about Alana’s past and I want to know about what happens to her after the credits roll.  But that’s the mark of a great performance in a great film.  Alana is an endlessly interesting and compelling character.

Everyone else pales in comparison, but Ms. Haim’s co-star Cooper Hoffman (the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) is pretty darn great as Gary.  Mr. Hoffman makes his performance seem effortless.  He is so funny and so endearing — and also so (intentionally!) frustrating!! — as the confident (sometimes tipping over into arrogant) huckster kid Gary.  Mr. Hoffman has a soulfulness and a playfulness that together work wonders on the screen.

The rest of the cast shines.  I loved all of the kids surrounding Gary and Alana.  I loved that so many of Alana Haim’s real-life family members (her parents and sisters) were cast as Alana’s parents and sisters in the film!  (Those scenes in Alana’s home had such a lived-in naturalism to them.)  Sean Penn doesn’t seem to do too much acting these days, but he was magnetic and note-perfect in his small role as actor Jack Holden (a character apparently based on real-life actor William Holden).  Bradley Cooper steals the film every second he’s on-screen as Jon Peters, to whom Gary & Alana & co. try to deliver a waterbed in one of the film’s most insane sequences.  Mr. Cooper (decked out in a perfect costume) is hilarious as he portrays the frantic (coked-up?) Peters.  Benny Safdie (co-director of Uncut Gems) is great as the closeted mayoral candidate Joel Wachs.  Tom Waits pops up for a few perfect moments as Rex Blau, a director (apparently based on Mark Robson) who coaxes Sean Penn’s character into doing something really stupid.  John Michael Higgins (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, Pitch Perfect) is hilarious and detestable as Jerry Frick, the owner of the Mikado, the first Japanese restaurant in the Valley.  Christine Ebersole is spot-on as Lucy Doolittle, the older actress (based on Lucille Ball) with whom we see Gary going on tour at one point in the film.  George DiCaprio (Leonardo DiCaprio’s father) is great in a small role as Mr. Jack.  Maya Rudolph graces the screen for a few moments in one of Gary’s casting sessions.  I could go on…!

I found Licorice Pizza to be very funny, but there’s definitely uncomfortableness and unpleasantness in the film as well.  The uncomfortableness for me comes from how effectively the film is at portraying the selfishness and idiocy of young people.  Most of the kids in the movie, particularly the two leads Gary and Alana, make bad decisions in the film, and it’s hard to watch.  (Seeing Gary make a big deal of snubbing Alana at the opening night of their waterbed store was painful.)  Teenagers can be stupid, and the film doesn’t shy away from that.  It also doesn’t shy away from the grossness of adult men.  We see Sean Penn’s character be wildly inappropriate towards Alana, asking her out for a dinner date after her audition with him.  We see John Michael Higgins’ character, the owner of the Japanese restaurant, swap out his Japanese wives (apparently considering the two women to be indistinguishable), and talk to both of them in a horribly racist fake Japanese accent.  I can see some turning away from the movie in those moments.  For me, it was part of the film’s warts-and-all look at both the process of growing up as well as this specific location and era — the good and the bad.

The one aspect of the film’s uncomfortableness that I wasn’t quite able to shake was the suggestion of a romantic relationship between the 25 year old Alana and the 15 year old Gary.  The two don’t look that far apart on screen, but the movie makes a point of repeatedly emphasizing their respective ages.  I’d thought that after Alana initially rebuffs Gary’s romantic overtures that this would be a story more focused on their friendship.  And, indeed, the film does tell the story of the ups and downs and gradual deepening of their friendship.  But it also keeps that romantic element a part of things right up through the ending.  I must admit this made me a little uncomfortable.  This might be realistic — I don’t think it’s shocking that there might be a degree of sexual tension in this type of close, intense friendship between two young people, regardless of the age difference.  But if the genders had been reversed (and this had been a story about a 25 year old boy and a 15 year old girl), I’d think people would be picketing the film.  So even having things the other way around strikes me as slightly off-putting.  This is an off-note for me in a movie which I otherwise very much enjoyed.

And I found so much to enjoy.  John C, Reilly’s seconds-quick cameo as The Munsters’ Fred Gwynne.  That crazy scene in which, at Gary’s urging, Alana meets with an intense casting agent (Harriet Samson Harris, playing real-life agent for child actors Mary Grady).  And I don’t know that I can recall a more exhilarating sequence than when steely-eyed Alana guides the out-of-gas moving truck down the winding hills of Encino… BACKWARDS.  What a sequence!

Once again Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a wonderfully unique, original film, one stuffed with memorable characters and scenes, and one which has lingered in my mind long after seeing it.

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