[7.0/10] I love the texture of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies. There are few filmmakers working today who are better at evoking a particular time or place with all the light and color of the cinema. As in the seminal *Boogie Nights*, Anderson again conjures an image of Southern California in the 1970s that is simultaneously nigh-magical and viscerally real at the same time. To dip into one of his cinematic worlds is a treat in and of itself.
But I don’t really like Gary Valentine. I don’t really like Alanna Kane. And while there’s something to be said for Anderson putting together a slice-of-life collage of a peculiar childhood, I don’t need to see those vignettes hung onto the spine of a dysfunctional romance between an adult and a high schooler. *Licorice Pizza* is nice to dip into for the craft on display in almost every moment. But it doesn’t just feel shaggy. In places, it feels pointless, and sometimes even unpleasant.
Mainly that comes down to the two main characters and the fact that Anderson and company anchor the movie around a romance I don’t really want to see blossom. I can set aside the age difference for the purposes of cinematic storytelling. Gary and Alana look and act similar in age, so while intellectually there’s a discomfort in the distance of years between them, the look and level of maturity between them seems to put them on the same level psychologically for a work of fiction.
But there’s not much to latch onto in their relationship. Gary Valentine is an operator, a schmoozer, who lures Alana more than he ever seeks an honest emotional connection with her. That’s fine! He’s fifteen! People thrice his age struggle to make honest emotional connections with people. It’s just hard to invest in a relationship founded on that, especially when Valentine calls to mind the practiced preciousness of indie movie teens like Max Fischer in *Rushmore* without ever having the sort of humbling and turn toward the true and earnest that Max does.
For her part, Alana is a combative jerk, ready to respond with any show of affection or interest with a proclamation of “Idiot!” or some other insult, occasionally accompanied but mild but menacing physical violence. There’s parts of her personality which are endearing -- her sense of being the black sheep and wanting to get out which put a chip on her shoulder -- but her combination of nigh-teasing friendliness paired with frequent, jarring acerbic turns makes her a hard one to warm to.
That’s life though. If there’s a defense for *Licorice Pizza* in that regard, it’s that as one character says toward the end of the film, “They’re all shits.” It seems meant to remind Alana that she’s met a lot of assholes over the course of the film, but for all his immaturity, Gary’s the only one who’s actually shown care and kindness to her. But it fits as something broader, where all the general jerkery that goes on between Alana and Gary can be chalked up to real people having dysfunctional friendships that are messier than those we normally see on the silver screen.
There’s two problems with that though. The first is that much of the time *Licorice Pizza* plays like a fantasy, or certainly a very heightened reality. Supposedly the screenplay is based on actual life events of one of Anderson’s friends as a kid. Suffice it to say, the experiences of being a child star flown out to New York for press junkets, opening a waterbed store and pinball palace, running into Hollywood bigwigs who leap flaming pits on motorcycles or threaten bystanders over gas shortages, and helping to manage a mayoral campaign seem downright fantastical, and certainly unrelatable, to those of us apparently unlucky enough *not* to have grown up in Encino in the 1970s.
The upshot is that there’s a disharmony between the seemingly exaggerated world that Gary and Alana occupy and the “warts and all” friendship the film wants to dramatize between them. It’s hard to take the messiness as real when it’s juxtaposed with a hodgepodge of over-the-top adventures that seem to have little tether to reality or clear cause and effect between them.
The second is that Alana and Gary suck to each other. Okay. They’re young. They’re impulsive. They’re still both works in progress. But their entire M.O. throughout the film is for one to be aloof to the other until the other one makes them jealous, which starts the cycle anew. Even if you can get past the age difference, it never feels like a healthy relationship, or one that could blossom into that, just two kids taunting and poking at each other until they decide the rest of the world they’ve been chasing sucks even more.
The key is supposed to be that when the chips are down, they look out for each other. Gary’s mistakenly arrested for murder (another bizarre interlude in the conveyor belt of disconnected episodes here), and Alana races to the station on foot to help him. Alana falls off the back of a motorcycle during a stunt, and while everyone’s eyes are on the actor who makes the jump, Gary rushes to look after her. Running is a recurring visual motif here, brought back at the end of the picture, when the two young people run in search of one another and exalt when they both finally admit their affections.
These scenes are meant to show that despite the outward prickliness and schmoozing, deep down the two truly care for one another. But it’s not enough to make up for the other ninety percent of the movie where either they play cruel games for one another or, at best, don’t seem like a healthy fit.
That wouldn’t be such a big problem if it weren’t the skeleton the rest of the movie is built around. Take away the romance, and all you have is a bunch of random vignettes that work better as individual snippets rather than part of a larger narrative. *Licorice Pizza* is a patchwork quilt of these standalone portraits, vaguely united by the common characters involved, but mostly an excuse to stitch together a random assortment of stories from someone’s SoCal youth without any real connective tissue or sense of build or unity between them.
And yet, I’d take many, if not most of them on their own. Anderson knows how to construct a scene, even if the broader compendium of them comes off a little wonky and misshapen. Harriet Sansom Harris nearly steals the show as an eccentric but memorable child talent agent in a one-scene wonder. Tom Waits is as garbled-yet-effervescent as ever as an old director who spurs his actor buddy to perform an impromptu stunt. And Joseph Cross offers the most touching interlude in the film, as the boyfriend of a mayoral candidate torn up over how the clash between political aspirations and their homoseuxality leaves him always having to put his needs to the side. Some of the episodes in the film go a little too over the top, but there’s something there, something worth keeping, in almost all of them.
Occasionally, that comes down to the pure craft of the moment. Anderson and co-cinematographer Michael Bauman are wizards with light. Whether it’s evoking a smoke-filled bar in low light while an old actor tells his tales, brightening the cacophony of colors of 1970s fashion and decor, or lighting Alana in silhouette from a distance, the two of them and their team evoke moods and simply present striking images which take full advantage of the medium.
At the same time, Anderson pulls off still more of his famously well-choreographed longer takes. There’s a regular sense of motion in this film, with extended shots that follow the characters as they walk down one throughway for another, capturing the energy of movement and even chaos as it stalks them around the streets of these Los Angeles neighborhoods. You may not always love the people pounding the pavement, but you will almost always feel like you’re there.
Maybe that's enough. Perhaps without the nostalgia for this time and place, it’s harder to connect with people like Gary and Alana. It’s tough to wonder why Anderosn didn’t just release a series of shorts about a grab bag of experiences in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s, rather than smushing them all together when they don’t fit. It’s more difficult to see why we should root for a romance between two people who don’t seem to know how to be kind to one another, even if they do like each other.
But *Licorice Pizza* does bring you into their world, the peculiar ecosystem of eccentric Hollywood stars, child entrepreneurs, and luminous dreams that painted block after block and row after row. Wherever Anderson goes, he takes you with him, and that’s worth something, even if you’re not enamored with the fellow passengers he’s selected for the ride.
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