Three writers offer their thoughts on Paul Thomas Anderson's newest film Licorice Pizza.
Is it enough for a film to be joyous? Does that forgive its odd shape and amoral longings? So much of the broad project of the popular American cinema seems to depress a person, whether through unimaginative militarism or dour rumination on the human condition thrice filtered through generic idioms so shopworn that to look through them is like wearing antique glasses. But to see something clear-eyed in its nostalgia for bad times and honest... that I'd venture approaches uniqueness. Licorice Pizza is a happily grotesque joy ride through scarcity that feels like excess. In dingy carpeted rooms lit by cigars and ugly orange halogens pouring through liquor, a ruddy dreamer with his father's gorgeous, quaking sincerity, tries to wave his hands and create the world. His burlesque of chintzy capitalist adulthood is laundered by the girl next door who should have become something by now, but her constant drifting back into the young man's orbit says she knows she hasn't and wasn't ever going to "make it." The girl who can, per Joyce, enjoy invisibility, but doesn't want it. A yellowing yearbook filled with signatures from Clint Eastwood, Alan Rudolph, Peter Bogdanovich, and Robert Altman. Life is short, everyone is out for themselves, have a great summer. We need joy more than we need answers. There's so little of it to go around.
Tucker Johnson
Licorice Pizza occupies two separate spaces for me. The first is the experience of a young man falling for an older woman. People want to make a big deal of the ages of the two characters but I think the picture is best painted with the serious gap between them. Alana isn’t just another girl at school that Gary develops a crush on. She’s foreign to his world. She’s exotic to him. As a former 15 year old that idea is incredible. The politics and drama of school are removed. Friends and peers can’t judge Gary or speak against Alana because they don’t know her. It’s why summer camp romances happen. No one has a history or elevated stake in what’s going on. It’s a story beat that illustrates beautifully the freedom of being 15. Love doesn’t come with too many strings at that age and the insanity of so much of what these two get up to together works to back that up.
The second space this film lives in for me is the idea that happiness is exactly what people need it to be. Despite all the time Gary and Alana spend trying to make it, legally or otherwise, the film’s end really just reminds us that even if a particular status, job, relationship, etc is viewed positively by those around you and a relationship is not, that doesn’t confirm one is better than the other. Gary and Alana really are good for one another. They disagree but that’s about as serious as it gets between them. To your point, Scout, their caring for each other is joyous. They are both kind of able to extend that feeling of a summer romance for much longer than the season would allow. Being able to resist having to grow up with your favorite person by your side? What could be better?
Sean Van Deuren
One could make the case that every Paul Thomas Anderson film is at heart a romantic comedy. His films thrive on the kinetic energy and mad sparks that fly when two unlikely characters begin a chaotic love affair, even if their love is less romantic than symbiotic. Whether it’s Lancaster Dodd and Freddie Quell in The Master, Doc and Bigfoot in Inherent Vice, Alma and Reynolds in Phantom Thread, it makes no difference what the surface level genre or plot is because, in the end, the real engine inside each of these stories is what happens when two opposites meet in harmony. It’s fitting then that whenever Anderson goes into full romantic comedy mode, as in Punch-Drunk Love and most recently in the wonderful Licorice Pizza, we seem to get a filmmaker working at full capacity in a cinematic language that is unmistakably and wholly his own. Is it enough for a film to be joyous? I certainly hope so. But even so Licorice Pizza has complexity, nuance, absurdity, longing, and strangeness to add to the mix. It’s Amarcord a la Altman and Saturday Night Live — except any comparisons don’t really do justice to the truly dazzling and dizzying experience of watching what is possibly the most himself Paul Thomas Anderson has ever allowed one of his films to be. There’s a looseness within the control of each scene that can only be described as masterful. Licorice Pizza is a joy, yes, but it’s also an audacious, oddball spectacle of two lost people living in a lost era who manage somehow to discover themselves temporarily through each other.
Scout Tafoya
I find myself thinking more and more of Luchino Visconti, the cinematic heir to Thomas Mann, when thinking of Paul Thomas Anderson. Visconti showed us the world at first, but then he created the world anew, a place of degenerate values and infernal longings. The impossible made not just possible but sweaty and pulsing, something you could reach out and touch if you dared. Anderson seemed to be deliberately reaching into Visconti's world when he made Phantom Thread, what with its tyrannical fashion designer hero and New Year's detour on a magic mountain. Visconti's heroes are so frequently like Anderson's. Doomed aristocrats and lost deck hands-cum-street urchins, kings in their own mind and kings trapped by real crowns. Anderson has little trouble reveling in their twisted fates in lovingly appointed apartments and ballrooms but he seems most at home on the streets. Tracking around California's sun kissed sidewalks with upstart entrepreneurs solving the mysteries of the universe. Inherent Vice, Punch-Drunk Love and now Licorice Pizza show what happens, what the world becomes, when you've got an idea and you're in love. Sean as you say it's about people finding themselves through each other, magnificently put, but it's about people giving each other permission to make the world in their own image. Just as rogue producer Jon Peters (in perhaps the greatest group of scenes in this unstoppably delightful collection of scenes) and councilman Joel Wachs are trying to turn the valley into what they wish it to be, Alana and Gary want to shape it to, but to their liking to fit their dreams. Alana wants to know that wherever she wants to drive the road will accommodate her. Gary wants to know that whatever happens next he's the first one to take advantage of it, the king of a plastic empire of fad merchandise and neon signs. Joyce again: "Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed. And no more turn aside and brood. Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening." It's all in Anderson's memory, the bad men and worse history, but for him and for his heroes it was home. And now it can be ours for a few hours as history collapses in on itself in the now.
Tucker Johnson
I think all three of us have joked before about how in a perfect world, despite our varying opinions on his first three films, PTA’s career should just have started with Punch-Drunk Love. Other than maybe getting Adam Sandler to be in your first film the idea of a 90 minute, odds and ends film like PDL seems like the rebirth of PTA. It’s insane that even in 2022, Punch-Drunk Love still sits at more or less the halfway point of his output.
I think, though, looking at Licorice Pizza with a little distance it feels to me like Boogie Nights by way of the current PTA. Both films consist of a lot of the same types of scene. The time period of course but also the hustle, whether that be in the form of porn, selling stereos, selling waterbeds, making action films (more porn), etc. Both films move pretty freely from sequence to sequence, scene to scene, but Licorice Pizza just does so with 20 years more experience. Not every moment needs to be the be-all end-all. Life is just life. Things happen or they don’t and we move on regardless.
I think Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza are companion works in their characters as well. Gary and Dirk feel like stand-ins for one another. Both young gifted men who make the best of their abilities to be successful outside of what society hopes for or expects of them. The same is true I think of Alana and Amber (Julianne Moore). They both work in the same chosen fields as the men in their lives but are judged or treated far more poorly because of it than the guys. Both also become de-facto mothers for all of the men surrounding them. I think it falls again to PTA having had 20 years to mature on how he tells a story to put Alana at the forefront of getting herself out of trouble rather than repeatedly succumbing to the freedom and excess that her chosen world and the men in it allow her.
Sean Van Deuren
That's such an interesting point, Tucker, about PTA maturing and putting the character of Alana getting herself out of trouble at the forefront. It raises an interesting question: who exactly is the film's protagonist? It's mostly described as a dual coming-of-age tale, but can we say that's really true? Yes, Gary is a lead, but his character arc is static compared to Alana's. We never see the same kind of quiet moments of reflection for Gary, for instance, that we witness Alana having. The most significant and meaningful example of this being the potentially life-threatening incident where she drives a truck without gas backwards down a hill at night to escape Bradly Cooper's wild rendition of Jon Peters (Gary is present, but remains typically unphased). Afterward, however, we see Alana sitting alone on the sidewalk curb with a look that says she's thinking through every life decision she's ever made — one of the film's quieter and more poignant moments. Rather than a shared coming-of-age tale, this seems to be Alana's story in the same way that Phantom Thread was Alma's story and The Master was Freddie's story. These are the characters facing struggles and changing over the course of the narrative. Of course, to call Alana the sole protagonist might be a stretch, too. After all, Licorice Pizza is not exactly playing by any conventional narrative rules. In that sense, perhaps the better question to ask is not who is the protagonist but rather is there a protagonist at all? Or has PTA instead made a film playing to a different beat entirely? Given the joyfully uneven pacing, focus on scene-stealing side characters, soundtrack bursting with songs often played till their entire length, and the overall lovingly crafted world-building, is it possible the true protagonist of Licorice Pizza is actually the sense of time and place, San Fernando valley in the 70s, itself? It seems at every corner, the setting is interrupting the narrative — saying: look at me — and constantly reminding us that the time we're living in can sneak up on you and interrupt your own story, like the police randomly whisking Gary away from selling waterbeds for mistaken murder chargers or a drunken old time film director (Tom Waits) commanding everyone in a restaurant to put their steaks aside to watch Sean Penn's version of William Holden perform a motorcycle stunt outside or the surprise of a cherry bomb going off in a bathroom stall as high school boys are trying to comb their hair for picture day. This feeling of being alive at a particular time and place keeps taking over and changing things up, like the needle on a record player pushing forward and switching to the next song and then the next song. And though all these period details are crucial, the film ultimately transcends the boundaries of the historical. It's not merely reminding you how it felt to be alive in the early 70s, but how it feels to be alive in general. The cumulative effect of all these scenes washing over you is a feeling of buoyancy and a sense of wonder at the strangeness and the surprise of being alive, as if the film is giving us the same advice Gary tells Alana as prep before a completely madcap casting interview: whatever's asked of us, just say yes.
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