Licorice Pizza (2021)
Licorice Pizza arrives with the kind of creative pedigree that tends to generate genuine anticipation rather than mere industry buzz. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it is a loose, sun-drenched coming-of-age story set in the San Fernando Valley during 1973, a film built less around plot mechanics than around atmosphere, character, and the particular feeling of a specific time and place. Anderson drew loosely on the real-life adolescence of Gary Goetzman, a child actor who did indeed run various business ventures as a teenager in the Valley, though the film wears that biographical material lightly, using it as a springboard for something more impressionistic than biographical. Produced through Anderson's own Ghoulardi Film Company alongside Bron Studios, with distribution handled by Focus Features and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, it was a mid-budget passion project of the kind that Hollywood used to greenlight more readily. It earned Anderson an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and competed at the Venice Film Festival, where it screened to considerable enthusiasm.
Anderson is, of course, one of American cinema's most consistently ambitious filmmakers, the man behind There Will Be Blood (2007), which remains for many the high-water mark of his career. Licorice Pizza represents a deliberate gear-change from that film's monumental, almost operatic quality. This is Anderson in a more relaxed, freewheeling register, less interested in architecture than in texture. The two central performances are the film's real gamble. Alana Haim, best known as one third of the pop group HAIM, makes her lead acting debut as Alana Kane, a young woman adrift in her own life who becomes entangled with Gary Valentine, played by Cooper Hoffman. Hoffman is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who appeared in several of Anderson's earlier films, and there is something quietly poignant about seeing that face on screen in an Anderson picture. Both leads carry the film with a naturalism that never feels performed. Sean Penn appears in a memorable extended cameo as a fictionalised William Holden type, all bravado and faded glamour, while Tom Waits turns up as a film director in a scene that is as strange and funny as you would hope. Bradley Cooper's performance as a Jon Peters stand-in, all volcanic energy and period-appropriate excess, is the kind of thing that lodges in the memory well after the credits roll.
On the technical side, Anderson shares the cinematography credit with Michael Bauman, a collaboration that extends back through several of Anderson's projects. The images here are shot on film, giving the whole thing a warm, slightly grainy texture that suits the period without feeling like a costume. Colours bleed gently at the edges; sunlight sits heavy on parking lots and diners and the unremarkable streets of the Valley. There is nothing showy about the visual approach, which is precisely the point. It feels observed rather than constructed. The score is the work of Jonny Greenwood, who has become Anderson's most sustained creative partner, their collaboration stretching back over a decade and multiple films. Here Greenwood's work is more restrained than on some of their previous projects, blending period pop and original composition in a way that is warm without being saccharine. Editor Andy Jurgensen, who also worked with Anderson on Phantom Thread, cuts the film with a rhythm that mirrors its rambling, episodic structure. Scenes seem to end slightly before or after you expect them to, which gives the film its loose, easy quality.
For a companion piece from a similar era, see also Napoleon Dynamite (2004), another film that locates its charm in the social margins of American adolescence, and I also wrote about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), a film that shares Licorice Pizza's interest in period atmosphere and the gap between a person's self-image and their reality.
I wanted to like Licorice Pizza, and in plenty of ways it makes that easy.
Paul Thomas Anderson steeps the whole thing in a gorgeous, sun-warmed 1970s California, the soundtrack is superb, it is funny in stretches and beautifully acted throughout.
It follows a slow-burn, not-quite-romance between two people drifting through the San Fernando Valley, and Anderson has a lovely feel for the push and pull between them, the way they circle one another and gradually work out how they feel. On the surface, it is a charmer.
But there is a problem at its centre I simply could not get past, and it is a big one. The relationship is between a twenty-five-year-old woman and a fifteen-year-old boy, and the film asks you to find it sweet, even to root for it. I could not. However charming the playing, I never once stopped being aware that one of these two is a grown adult and the other a child, and it sat wrong with me the whole way through. Flip the genders and picture the same story told about a man of twenty-five and a girl of fifteen, and I doubt many of us would be calling it a lovely romance.
What frustrates me most is that it did not have to be this way. The age gap adds nothing the film actually needs. Make the pair of them roughly the same age and you would have essentially the same movie, the same wit, the same nostalgia, the same aimless charm, without the queasy undertow.
As it is, I am left admiring a great deal about it, the craft, the mood, the performances, while unable to embrace the thing sitting right at its heart. Three stars, a film I might well have loved had it not asked me to be so comfortable with something I am not.
Licorice Pizza is, taken purely as a formal exercise, a polished but uneven piece of work, the kind of film that sits comfortably in the middle tier of a filmmaker's output without really threatening their best work. Anderson's craft is not in question, and neither are the performances, which are among the more charming you will find in a film from this period. What the film leaves you turning over is not so much any technical question but a moral one, and the fact that it was released to widespread praise suggests that this particular discomfort was not universally shared. That is, itself, an interesting thing to sit with. Some films entertain you. Others leave you with a question you did not expect to be asking on the way home. Licorice Pizza, whatever else it is, manages to be both of those things at once.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-09-27
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Licorice Pizza (2021) on YouTube
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