Licorice Pizza

Pizza is a meal composed of a variety of ingredients that stick out individually but laid out on a common platform that is the bread. We’ve never heard of a licorice pizza, it sure does sound like an odd or rare combination / flavor that we would never come across, if ever. Combine these two facts and you could pretty much summarize Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 film itself!

Our protagonists are 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and 25-year-old Alana (Alana Haim). Physically, the boy doesn’t look his age but there definitely exists an age gap between these two characters as it is visibly established in the first, super engrossing conversation these two share that flows like dripping butter! Whatever they speak to each other are absolutely simple and arresting accompanied by an equally laidback and romantic jazz music; it’s ridiculous how such a thing could glue you to your seats! You could watch this go on and on and never get tired!

Back to the point, Gary is attracted to Alana when he first meets her doing her job at the time, which is to capture yearbook photos for high-schoolers. He is a confident guy who has many successful endeavors going for him. He’s a child actor, with great prospect of business and future foresight. Alana on the other hand is a simple small town girl who wishes to get out of this life and town to be something else. She always carries that wistful tone whenever she is drowned alone in her thoughts or talks about it to someone. When Alana is introduced, she is not shown to be cheerful at all. There’s a certain sense of tiredness in her and her change in mood only happens when she meets Gary. In fact, once her delightful initial conversation with Gary is over, an adult male photographer casually slaps her ass as she walks by. It’s crazy how such behavior could pass off as anything normal, but that’s how bad and unfortunate it is back in the day it would seem like, and the very fact that Alana just walks away from said disgusting incident with clear distaste yet deliberate inaction tells you the frequency she has experienced such a horrendous thing, which adds more weight to her desire to leave this place and life.

Licorice Pizza is essentially about Gary and Alana’s relationship, and the many turmoil they face before eventually accepting each other over themselves. The theme of the main events would be each of these two tries to make the other one jealous. Be it with Lance (Skyler Gisondo), Jon Peters, Jack Holden or the various high school girls Gary dates, this is the consistently present undercurrent emotion, quite literally. In order to render this conflict interesting, the writer-director tried to place the 70s landscape and various highlights of that era, from live television ads, rise of independent ventures, glorified movie stars, problematic / narcissistic celebrities, political campaigns to oil crisis as the backdrop. Due to this, the film does receive truly arresting scenes, namely Gary’s wrongful arrest that’s filmed as shocking as it would be for him, Grand Opening rejection, ridiculously sexy waterbed phone sale, boobs showcase and the argument revolving nudity, scene recreation from The Bridge of Toko-San with an amazing cameo by Sean Penn as Jack Holden and Bradley Cooper’s special appearance as the volatile Jon Peters with the entire gripping episode of Alana driving the truck all the way backwards to escape exactly him, but the proceedings do not flow smoothly into and out of each other at all. These events appear as chunks of its own, standing out just like the individual ingredients on a pizza! Before we forget, the pristine production design and camerawork that are completely faithful to the 70s is by far the strongest technical aspect of this motion picture.

Alana and Gary undergo the same experiences but their distinct reactions to those experiences highlight their age difference. Whether it’s when the oil crisis news hit or post the truck escapade, you could clearly see how Alana knows the seriousness and ridiculousness of it, unlike Gary. In the adult world, her attempt to fit in it isn’t successful either as she isn’t taken seriously, which pushes her to return where she might as well be, that is with Gary. By the way, Gary holding off his intention / temptation to feel Alana’s boobs when she’s asleep is an instance where it shows his character.