Licorice Pizza
“Alana is constantly hit on, ogled at, or subjected to predatory advances.”
Title: Licorice Pizza (2021)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson 👨🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Elaine 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 3/5
The latest from Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread) is a coming-of-age romance where no one actually really comes of age, as the incidental plot takes a backseat to strong performances by debut actors Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman. Anderson sure does make the trip pretty though, and half the fun is seeing what stranger-than-fiction personality he’ll introduce next.
Set in 1970s San Fernando Valley, Licorice Pizza feels like the writer-director’s ode to a bygone decade, and to perhaps the halcyon days of his youth. The film meanders at times but is made up by visual flair: The usage of vintage ‘70s camera lenses and carbon lighting achieves an authentic look, seen in moments like the softness of Alana’s (Haim) skin in golden hour light. Thankfully, Anderson never uses nostalgia as a crutch, unlike similar movies such as Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) which employ ostentatious needle drops or wistfully feature technological before-times. (“Look, remember when we used rotary phones?”) Besides gentle reminders like seeing Nixon on the television, or a will-they-won’t-they scene that has a hand creeping over a waterbed, Licorice Pizza could exist in any time.
Haim especially is a revelation as Alana. She spits lines and runs through streets, yet her impulsiveness goes hand in hand with her uncertainty as a 25-year-old still trying on identities to figure out her place in the world. She’s propulsion and sparkling energy in a film that often loses its purpose. However, Anderson hems her in with her improbable relationship with Gary (Hoffman), who plays a kid a decade younger than her. Anderson tries to make her relationship with Gary plausible by having him evince a confidence beyond his years, but their romance just isn’t convincing. Unfortunately, the more you dissect why, the more you realize that they’re not much more than caricatures of their base desires.
Licorice Pizza would have been better without their so-called romance, and sometimes the movie plays like an unlikely fantasy brought to life, especially when you learn that Anderson was partially influenced by his own childhood crush on Haim’s mother. Ultimately, this makes the story feel pinned to his memories or his wishes, rather than allowing the characters to honestly develop their own stories.
Gender: 1/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE
Although Licorice Pizza marks Anderson’s first film with a female lead, it still very much centers the male gaze. Alana runs the gamut of contrasts, some that flesh her out and others that only make her implausible.
When we first meet Alana, she gets slapped on the butt by her boss, a kind of wink about the boorishness of men in that decade. Alana is constantly hit on, ogled at, or subjected to the unfortunate predatory advances of show biz of the decade. Anderson attempts to combat that with Alana’s confidence, showing her brashly interrogating a date about his penis or taking charge by driving a Ford truck. Yet he never addresses the unconscious male gaze he subjects her to, like when he has her parade around in a bikini in a room of fully-clothed people. Similarly, when Gary complains about not getting to see her breasts, she marches to his house later and inexplicably shows them to him. It’s like her firecracker personality serves as window-dressing for Gary’s desires.
Although Anderson has talked about their relationship as chaste—without a “provocative bone,” to be exact—he doesn’t develop Alana much beyond the confines of Gary’s adolescent fantasies. Anderson’s way of keeping the relationship “pure” allows Gary free fantastical rein, from his declaration that he’s going to marry Alana one day to his sly peeks at her after spotting a porno ad. On the other hand, Alana isn’t allowed to act on improper thoughts towards him because that would be “provocative” (and illegal). But this robs Alana of even having her own attractions; she always only develops attraction for other men after they express interest in her. For a movie that supposedly centers Alana, it reveals nothing of her sexual desires or her personal agency. Alana ultimately ends up as flat and inconsistent, because you can’t have a character this vibrant who would realistically fall for Gary, who has the charm of a used car salesman (and is fifteen years old.)
Alana hardly interacts with anyone outside of Gary, let alone other women, even though she has two older sisters. Besides an argument with one of them, all her other conversations revolve around her relationship with Gary and whether it’s weird that they hang out. At the film’s conclusion, when she realizes that all men are “little shits, aren’t they?”, she runs back to Gary as if she might as well end up with him since no one else offers a better alternative. But why does she have to end up with a man at all? Damningly, the movie’s arc hinges on her completion with Gary rather than any personal growth.
Race: 1/5
By the time I watched Licorice Pizza, Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) had already released a statement addressing the movie’s casual racism. But I went into the movie unaware and was completely blindsided when sitting through the scenes in question. Licorice Pizza’s two short scenes centering around Jerry (John Michael Higgins), a white restaurant owner, and his Japanese wives (first Yumi Mizui and then Megumi Anjo) are offensive and entirely unnecessary for the film’s narrative. In them, the Japanese women speak unsubtitled Japanese, only for Jerry to reply in English with a weird, off-putting racist accent. The scenes are meant to be played for laughs, and “payoff” occurs in the second scene, when Gary calls the Japanese woman by the name Mioko. Jerry then corrects him, saying that he divorced Mioko and that this is his new wife, Kimiko. The two Japanese women are ostensibly identical for both Gary and Jerry. Jerry then goes on to admit that he actually doesn’t understand a word of Japanese.
Apparently this is Anderson’s attempt to faithfully portray the pervasive racism of the era. In interviews, he has even said that he has experienced people talking to his Japanese mother-in-law in the same way. At first glance, perhaps he means to set Jerry up as the butt of the joke. He’s clearly the fool in the scene, just as Mioko and Kimiko are obviously more intelligent than he is. For instance, Mioko objects to the phrase “doll-like waitresses” used to advertise their restaurant, preferring a focus on their actual cuisine. However, if they’re actually more intelligent, then why did they even marry the buffoon Jerry in the first place? It makes no sense that they would understand Jerry better while he’s speaking with that awful accent, or more importantly, that they would put up with it. Just because Anderson has witnessed his mother-in-law being talked to in that way doesn’t mean that she would go on to marry one of the people insulting her. Further, if they’re not meant to be “othered,” then why not translate their words with subtitles, which would have reinforced their personhood?
It’s not simply that Anderson has included these scenes, which he says is “honest to that time,” but that it completely disregards logic or the idea that these Japanese women have any feelings or intelligence. Maybe Jerry is the one being plumbed for cheap laughs here, but it’s the Asians in the story—and the audience—who are the real losers.
Mediaversity Grade: F 1.67/5.0
Anderson’s vision avoids cloying sentimentality even as it evokes a powerful nostalgia. I only wish Licorice Pizza would have been satisfied being a love letter to 1970s California, rather than a love story between Alana and Gary. At its best, the film is cinematic, aching, and visually stunning. At its worst, however, it’s a self-indulgent and myopic adolescent fantasy.
Like Licorice Pizza? Try these other nostalgic titles set in the ‘70s.
If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019)
This Is Us - Season 2