Paul Thomas Anderson’s portrait of Southern Californian youth in the early seventies, Licorice Pizza (2021), is the filmmaker’s most tender film to date. Licorice Pizza doesn’t carry the tension or danger of Anderson’s other films. Licorice Pizza is about the smaller events and the fleeting relationships that come with youth yet shape us into who we will be.
Licorice Pizza, at its core, is about the relationship between a fifteen year old child actor and hustler named Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and twenty-five year old Alana (Alana Haim). Gary is impetuous and in a hurry to grow-up; often he bites off more than he can chew. Alana is grown but hasn’t found direction or the confidence to shape her life and define herself. Despite their differences of age, Gary and Alana are each at a cross-roads and in the midsts of finding themselves.
The relationship between these two characters isn’t just romantic or a casual friendship. These oddballs have come together through a mutual infatuation. It’s an infatuation that exists fluidly; it alters course with major events. The sexual elements that arise on occasion do not define this infatuation. It’s such a fragile thing that is almost impossible to articulate with words. Anderson’s direction is so sensitive and compassionate that one feels the desire that Gary and Alana share to just be in each other’s orbit. It isn’t romantic love or friendship; it’s the mutual need to share specific moments together.
For these reasons Licorice Pizza has been compared to Hal Ashby’s classic Harold & Maude (1971). But the relationship in Ashby’s film is explicitly romantic so perhaps a better informed comparison would be to Arthur Barron’s film Jeremy (1973). The romance in Jeremy is never fully formed nor wholly articulated; the would be lovers are simply struggling to determine what it means to be a boyfriend and girlfriend. The relationship in Jeremy, ever in flux, is not strictly romantic.
Generally speaking, Licorice Pizza is about more than relationships, it is about youth. Anderson’s film is a portrait of exuberance, determination, and foolhardiness. Until now all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films have been about the loss of innocence or the failures of love. Now, suddenly, Anderson gives his audience a film that does nothing more but encapsulate the feelings of hope and tender infatuation.
