Moving Pictures by Mo Burford: Review of Licorice Pizza

Alana Haim as Alana Kane and Cooper Hoffman as Gary Valentine, photo courtesy of MGM Studios

Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)

By Mo Burford

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, Licorice Pizza, is a slice of nostalgia that left a bad taste in this reviewer’s mouth. Though aesthetically magnificent and masterfully crafted, the core of the film’s narrative is busted, irreconcilably.

This is a movie I really wanted to like, so I was prepared for it to be good, for it to even be a masterpiece. The feeling, then, of watching a film you think you are going to love by a filmmaker you already admire, that ultimately leaves you feeling a little queasy, is deeply disorienting. I found myself searching for reasons I might be wrong, for reasons that it was actually the movie I hoped it would be, instead of the movie it was.

The film centers on Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a 25-year-old living in Los Angeles whose life is adrift, and Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a 15-year-old child actor who sees himself destined for success as he dreams up various money-making schemes, such as selling the newly invented waterbed. The plot of the film is a series of wandering vignettes that loosely revolve around the two main characters’ relationship with each other—Gary is in love with Alana, and Alana is looking for something to anchor her life to. She finds herself orbiting Gary and, along the way, getting wrapped up in his schemes (which, in turn, keep Alana close to him). For me, if the movie had centered more on Alana and less on Gary, it would have been far more compelling; because hands down, Alana Haim is the breakout star of this film, her performance is powerful, visceral, complicated, and funny—everything you want in a lead.

My favorite parts of the film were the vignettes that focus less on Alana and Gary’s relationship and more on the environment of 1970’s Los Angeles. One such scene features Harriet Sanson Harris as casting agent Mary Grady. Her performance, captured almost exclusively in deep close-up, is a marvel to watch. The shifts in her expression, from comedic to heartbreaking and back, are exquisitely filmed by Anderson. Harris’s performance is utterly complex and moving. It’s a marvel to behold—heightened by the fact that we never see this character again—and a testament to what Anderson’s film can do at its best. If I could give an Oscar for a single scene, it would be this one. I was blown away. 

I’d be remiss here not to say a little about the direction and cinematography of the film: the camera pivots between dialogue, sachets back and forth as our characters move across the screen, and tracks joyfully alongside them as they run through the perpetually sunny Los Angeles streets. Many of the film’s large cast of characters are shown in deep close-up, as mentioned above, highlighting amazing performances that shift between comic, threatening, and heartbreaking. 

“The film doesn’t always make great choices around its characters, but it is always making interesting choices with the camera.”

And then, there are the scenes of characters running: for the joy of movement, to escape danger, towards each other with urgency; these moments almost always work, sweeping you up and carrying you along with them. In these moments, we see Anderson as a master of his craft. And while the film doesn’t always make great choices around its characters, it is always making interesting choices with the camera. If there is any real romance in the film, it's between Anderson and the making of movies: his love of cinema is palpable. Which is part of the heartbreak of watching the film: the entire time I was in love with how it was being made, but not in love with what it was making.

Another section of the film I loved features none other than Tom Waits and Sean Penn. At this point in the movie, Alana is trying to break into acting and Gary is pursuing a woman, for once, his own age. Waits plays director Rex Blau (dressed like some kind of giant child in a jaunty red and blue baseball cap) and Penn plays aging star, Jack Holden.

They are both essentially giant broken children with the privilege to do any old thing they want, including jumping a motorcycle over burning chairs on the sand trap of a golf course. The scene is chaotic, funny, dangerous and even a little inscrutable—at one point Jack delivers an odd monologue about Korea and towers and fire at Alana, to which she replies, “Is this lines? Is this real?” The moment so perfectly blurs the distinction between reality and movie magic, and reveals the odd trauma that blooms from the liminal space between those two points. That is, at the point where reality and make-believe blur, there seems to lurk a danger for losing sight of real consequences, real dangers. If the whole movie could have balanced its tone and masterful direction as this section had, it would easily be one of my favorites of the year.

But the movie had other plans. The chaste-ish relationship between Alana and Gary—25 and 15, respectively—was ludicrous at best and patently gross at worst. The film, outside of their relationship, shows its understanding of the dangers of toxic masculinity, but it is sadly unwilling to apply such understanding when confronting Gary’s actions and misdeeds. In one scene, after an amazingly frantic and tense escapade involving a gas-less moving truck rolling backwards down the Los Angeles hills, we find Alana sitting on a curb in the pre-dawn blue. On one side of her, a completely unhinged Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper) throws a garbage can through a plate glass window and then immediately follows two random women walking down the street, his intention clearly to hit on them. On the other side, Gary and his friends, returning with the much needed full gas can, hold it up in increasingly comic-sexual poses. The movie's perspective could not be clearer: Alana is stuck between, on one side, grown men who are dangerous lunatics, and immature little boys on the other. 

But this dynamic is never resolved; she remains, in one way or another, stuck between the two. We’re encouraged to see Gary as bound to grow up into his own version of the Jack Holdens and Jon Peters of the world, which makes the sweetness the movie portrays between him and Alana especially hard to stomach. He even tries to manipulate Alana, both for control (power) and for sex, undercutting the film’s self-awareness of the sexism that Alana must navigate. But the movie seems more interested in turning a blind eye to Gary's faults, reframing them for the sake of charm; that is, it misses the opportunity to address the things it shows it has the capacity to understand. 

Licorice Pizza is an aesthetic masterpiece that manages, in the end, to only half-deliver a pat romance fueled by toxic masculinity in the making, hollowing out the complexity of the film for a cheap kiss. In short, it wants to have its pizza and eat it too. 

If you are interested, however, in seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s best work, I have two recommendations: for a masterful blend of character study and powerful aesthetics, check out There Will Be Blood (2007); or, if you’re looking for something in a more romantic vein, I’d suggest Punch Drunk Love (2002).

★★1/2
(two and a half stars, out of 5)

Licorice Pizza is now showing at Skylight Theaters in Hood River, Oregon and select theaters. 

Questions, comments, movie suggestions? Email Mo at movingpicturesccc@gmail.com

For more reviews and to see his up-to-date movie log, follow Mo at Letterboxd.