Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the Valley with the funny, shaggy, scattershot Licorice Pizza
Alana Haim delivers a star-making performance in this messy coming-of-age comedy
Image: Photo: MGM Film Reviews Paul Thomas Anderson
Licorice Pizza is a woozy time-warp shuffle of a comedy: a California daydream of infatuation, aspiration, and protracted adolescence that seems to propel its celebrated writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, forward and backward at once. The film is set in the San Fernando Valley of the early 1970s, returning its maker to the time and place that made him, and also roughly to the same setting as his sprawling ensemble period pieces Boogie Nights and Inherent Vice. Yet if Licorice Pizza can be called a homecoming, it also paves new ground for the great American artist who plucked it from his memories and dreams: For better or worse, and especially on the heels of the refined, meticulous Phantom Thread, this looks like the shaggiest and most rambling movie of Anderson’s esteemed, ever-evolving career.
There’s an episodic quality here, almost a sense that the movie is making itself up as it goes along, across what feels like a single eventful summer of cameoing stars and breaking news pushed to the margins of fictional and fictionalized lives. At the center of its narrative, at once sprawling and incidental, is a love story—though, in the Andersonian tradition of romances punch-drunk and perverse, it’s an unconventional one.
The spark is lit in the opening scene, as 15-year-old child actor Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Anderson’s late muse, Philip Seymour Hoffman) first lays eyes on 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim, one of the three sisters of the rock band Haim) outside a photo studio. He’s a teenager and she’s not—a fact she repeats repeatedly, if only to remind herself—but there’s an undeniable chemistry detectable in the spaces between her jabs and amused rebukes. “I met the girl I’m going to marry one day,” waxes the teen to his kid brother later that night. We wonder if he’s right.
One might think of that other Anderson. There is, after all, a touch of Max Fischer in Gary, who’s pantomiming a life of adult sophistication and privilege—ordering Coca-Colas in his white suit at nightclubs, flanked by an entourage of comically pubescent friends. Gary, we learn, is rapidly aging out of whatever modest celebrity he’s achieved; his career is over before it’s begun. Yet he has the swagger of a young Hollywood somebody. And though Alana, who works at the photo studio, talks to him like the kid brother she never had (she actually has two sisters, played by Haim’s real sisters and bandmates), she’s plainly attracted, at the very least, to his proximity to fame. And so she’s pulled into the orbit of his teenage hustles, and even ends up working for him, an arrangement that echoes the thrust of Phantom Thread.
The plot is a crazy-quilt time capsule, pulling in the waterbed craze, the oil embargo of ’73, the pinball ban, a tight L.A. political race, and the amorous shit-kicking of New Hollywood. Anderson’s structure is borderline associative, his screenplay daisy-chaining the ephemera that may well have colored his own childhood in the Valley. Early on, the director—who shot the movie himself, with an assist from Michael Bauman—tracks his camera across the floor of a teen business expo, soaking in every gleaming shag detail of his early-’70s production design. In its loving mirage of a bygone Los Angeles, Licorice Pizza is like a gemini twin to Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, the last movie from fellow ’90s hotshot turned indiewood royalty Quentin Tarantino.
The cast is stacked with familiar faces and scions, the fathers of famous men and the daughters of famous directors, brought in for walk-ons or to steal a single scene. We get Sean Penn, skin rough like leather, as an aging man’s man who’s William Holden in all but Christian name. Elsewhere, Anderson doesn’t even bother to slightly rename his supporting players from history, casting Uncut Gems director Benny Safdie as the closeted L.A. politician Joel Wachs. And the film’s extended comic highlight involves the famed producer Jon Peters, pricelessly played by Bradley Cooper as a rich-dick lothario teetering, in his unfiltered asides, on the edge of danger; a waterbed installation at his swanky house in the hills becomes a gauntlet of close calls and mishaps, culminating with a van rolling perilously through traffic.
It’s a great scene. And there are plenty more, especially in the freewheeling first hour of the movie, animated by the electric currents of Gary’s and Alana’s dovetailing experiences. Yet as a story, Licorice Pizza barely hangs together. Anderson, high on his own nostalgic supply (and on the FM reverie of his all-star soundtrack of Doors, Donovan, and more), stumbles through an endless series of oddball peripheral characters and comic situations, some funnier than others. (There’s one strange recurring bit with John Michael Higgins as a restaurateur doing an outrageous Japanese accent that feels like it could have been plucked out of a bad ’70s comedy.) The director has made a blissed-out flashback portrait of his hometown that’s all incident, very little shape. He’s just riffing here, to sporadically satisfying effect.
The movie only truly clicks when it’s zeroing in on the screwball relationship at its center—a romance perched, rather indefinitely, on the edge of transgression. Anderson knows as well as Alana does that any real relationship between the two is impossible. And so he keeps the two locked in a suspended animation of fighting and flirting, pushing them in and out of each other’s lives, inching them closer and then tearing them apart, drowning them in jealous competition and then sending them racing—quite literally at times—back into each other’s arms.
Both leads are outstanding in their feature debuts. As a knucklehead Casanova straining for the fantasy of adult glory, Hoffman has a perfect embryonic blend of confidence and awkwardness; every once in a while, you’ll catch a flash of his father in his mannerisms, and the effect is always poignant. But the true star-making turn here is from Alana Haim, deepening the magnetic enthusiasm she’s teased in the Haim music videos Anderson directed. Her Alana is by turns fierce, vulnerable, petulant, sweet, and seductive. When Penn’s lecherous Tinseltown legend says she reminds him of Grace Kelly, it’s at once a transparent pickup line (she looks nothing like Kelly) and a perhaps accidental acknowledgment of her instant movie-star radiance. Earlier on, a Hollywood agent describes her as a pitbull. That’s accurate, too.
And Licorice Pizza is really, in the end, her film. Anderson’s savviest move is to frame the early scenes through the iris of Gary’s puppy-love attraction, only to gradually cede more and more of the spotlight to Alana. What we come to see is that, on an emotional level, she’s something of a kid, too—someone reaching for an idea of adult life that remains as out of reach for her as it does for her literally adolescent admirer. Lots of American comedies are about resisting growing up. This one is about really wanting to and failing, perhaps triumphantly. Funny how it arrives in a movie that feels like its own form of willful, carefree regression: a master director, resisting his own creative maturity, one digressive Los Angeles detour at a time.
119 Comments
this feels like the review of a movie that will only grow on me over time. very, very excited for this, though i’m wondering how it could be shaggier than inherent vice.
I love Haim and I’m thrilled for Alana to get such positive reviews in her first real acting gig. But it’s just more evidence for my theory that acting in films and television is really easy and anyone with charisma and confidence can be directed and edited into a great performance.
Sooo… “Almost Famous” meets “Annie Hall”?
I’m halfway dreading seeing this because it almost feels like it can’t live up to that incredible “Life on Mars?” trailer. I’m more excited for this than I have been for any Anderson movie since There Will Be Blood.
Really? I thought it was a horrible trailer that looked like a boring topic of guy falling for quirky girl. But because it’s PTA, an American treasure, I’m going to watch it as soon as it plays at my local theatre.
Me too. I was really looking forward to Inherent Vice though, so I’ve had a dry run for disappointment.
I just finally saw that this year. I thought it was very good, but “very good” is bottom-tier PTA.
The guy could film a potato for 2 1/2 hours and it’d be an event masterpiece.
I think my favorite movie of all time is “Boogie Nights,” so you bet I am going to watch the fuck out of this bad boy.
Shaggiest and most rambling movie of his career?I get that “Inherent Vice” was based on a novel and not “his” but that movie was shaggy and rambling as hell.
Still “bad” Paul Thomas Anderson, is still better than 90% of films released today. At least it doesn’t have superheroes.
Also, I’m guessing opens in “Select Theaters” on November 26th means two theaters in NY and LA and then it’ll come to my town sometime around December 26th.
Trust me, this is by no means “bad” Anderson.
I would have put Inherent Vice at the center of the “unfilmable” pile based upon the disorienting experience of reading the book, which often makes nonsensical jumps that you only gradually figure out. The fact that PTA was able to make a coherent story that maintained that sense of disorientation and confusion was quite a feat.
I really, really didn’t like “Inherent Vice.” Tragically.
I saw it in the theater, and in hindsight I’m kind of amazed how unmemorable it was. Leaving aside the plot (which I just remember being deliberately convoluted and inconclusive), I don’t remember any of the supporting characters or dialog. I do remember that it seemed like parts of the movie were supposed to be comedic and kind of fell flat. All of those things were unusual for a PTA movie.
Me either, but I appreciate that it exists, if that makes sense. So I have a feeling I will feel the same about this one.
I really, really did like Inherent Vice.
Good!
I was stoked for Inherent Vice when it came out. I ended up having to deal with watching it online after it was available (Netflix??). I stopped watching after 30 minutes. I had already stopped caring about the characters, and I decided that even if there was a payoff in the end for them, I wasn’t interested in wasting my time anymore. PTA is a great director, but goddamn does he need a script editor.
The mumbling was maddening on first viewing, then I re watched with subtitles on and it’s one of my favorite PTA’s.
I don’t know … in a way, all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies are super hero movies. Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love? The Hulk. Daniel Day Lewis’s characters in There Will be Blood and Phantom Thread? Hulk and Hulk. Mark Wahlberg’s penis in Boogie Nights? You guessed it: Hulk.
The Master is about the Hulk villain The Leader
INHERENT VICE was especially disappointing for anyone who read the book because the book was, um, funny? As is LICORICE PIZZA, or so says everyone I know. Which is why shaggy doesn’t scare me.
But The Master is about Aquaman.
I mean a movie based on a Pynchon novel is going to be rambling and shaggy, it can’t not be.
Alex Ross Perry’s Impolex perhaps didn’t have sufficient runtime for that.
I still think Inherent Vice is his best movie of the 2010s. The kind of intoxicating, languid, atmospheric cinema you can really get lost in. And it’s probably his funniest film too. So underrated.
Ironically I found The Master much funnier and much easier to get into.
I prefer the “bad” PTA of Inherent Vice to most of his “good” films. But this one doesn’t seem like it would appeal as much to fans of The Big Lebowski.
As a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson, I am ashamed to admit I have never seen Inherent Vice or Punch Drunk Love.
Yeah I haven’t seen Inherent Vice yet either, it’s on my list.
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing about Inherent Vice. I mean, the whole point of that film is that it’s literally a classic shaggy dog story!
I thought the same thing – surely it can’t be more rambling than Inherent Vice? That movie was 95% shag.
I get that “Inherent Vice” was based on a novel and not “his” but that movie was shaggy and rambling as hell First thing I thought of when I read this. Now… I liked Inherent Vice okay, and the novel is the only Pynchon I’ve finished reading. It was sort of like a Moses Wine mystery, if those were written by, well, Thomas Pynchon. (And here’s where I recommend the Moses Wine books – at least the first few. Later, Roger Simon went a bit odd in his political views, but even before that, the books sort of ran out of steam in my opinion. Wish there’d been a few more movies – we only got the one, The Big Fix, and Richard Dreyfuss was perfectly cast. In my alternate universe, we got a series of those movies, as well as a series of Easy Rawlins movies…. Oh, and some more Man from UNCLEs and the sequel to Roger Rabbit. In my alternate universe I sit around and just watch movies.)
Ironically, PTA has said he and his family love Marvel movies, listing the new Venom and Shang-chi as something recently he enjoyed. https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/paul-thomas-anderson-hypes-shang-chi-venom-2/
“At least it doesn’t have superheroes.” – Fully agree. Also I’ll pay you money if you change your last name to KILLDOZER. Or Rowsdowser.
Oh, so is this what the tweet we all thought was about Being the Ricardos was actually about?
> the pinball banwhut?Also, I am so here for this movie.
Pinball machines used to be considered an offshoot of gambling and even just the fact that most machines were manufactured in Chicago, a hotbed of mid-century organized crime, gave them an image of impropriety. They were full-on banned. Apparently that ban wasn’t overturned in California until 1974.
Now that is full-on crazy town. I had no idea.
My office has a pinball machine from the late 60s, and it has a sticker on it and everything certifying its inspection and authorization for legal use.
They weren’t banned nationally, but many big cities apparently had individual bans.
I heard that it had to be proved that it was a game of skill and not chance by having a pinball wizard basically call his shots to show that it’s not just a randomly bouncing ball.
I can just hear the voices of the officials watching this demonstration:“How do you think he does it?”“I don’t know.”“What makes him so good?”
But how? Pinball machines don’t pay out – or do they in the states?
Trouble
Right here in River City
With a capital T and that rhymes with P and…
The 3-disc 4K Criterion edition is already available for pre-order!!
It seems like Criterion should have a special “Upcoming Releases” slate that’s just “Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson / Wes Anderson / Noah Baumbach Project TBD.”
Anderson/Anderson? Don’t get my hopes up. Now I just want Anderson and Anderson (‘Maximum Anderson’, if you will) to make a film together…
Get Pam Anderson in there and then you’ve really got something!
“Pamela Anderson IS Laurie Anderson”
Shit, now that Louie Anderson is dead, the comment I should have made several months ago takes on a more mordant tone. So I’m not even going to bother.
Specifically, the film should be called “The Andersons”…
Hoping they eventually put out a Blu-Ray of Hard Eight too (and a 4K UHD would be even better), since it recently aired on the Criterion Channel in restored HD.
Toss in ‘The Magnificent Ambersons” and you might have something.
This is the least effusive Licorice Pizza review I’ve read so far. I’m so pumped.
seems like LA glad-handing, award shopping to me.Don’t get me wrong, these pieces have their places and I’m a LOT more excited about this than I would EVER be about La La Land, but for a PTA thing, I’m disappointed… at least until I see it. Boogie Nights was a thing I had no interest in until I actually saw it. Magnolia, for whatever crap it catches, is still a great film.I’ll withhold judgement.
Or maybe the guy who grew up in the valley really likes making movies about where he grew up. 5 of his 9 films take place in LA, and 4 of those in the valley.
This may be accurate, but it also plays very deeply with lots of LA films that get awards because they’re familiar to LA people.
I’m not trying to shit on anyone here, but it’s pretty clear that if you have a name in LA, & make a movie about LA life that people who live in LA can relate to, you’re way ahead of the pack in the awards season.
But you are kind of shitting on him. You are assuming until you see the movie that he intentionally made a movie set in L.A. to whore for awards. Is there anything in his history that marks him as that kind of artist/person?
Your first sentence is accurate, but so is my assertion that I’m not TRYING to shit on anyone… I like a TON of PTA’s work. The industry’s infrastructure is what it is.
Doesn’t change anything about what I said.
LA stories get Big Oscars every couple-few years. They just do.
Right, and if there is, it’s not working for him in that way. Although his films have rec’d numerous nominations, he hasn’t one any Oscars or even and Golden Globes.
Yeah, but New York has all the critics…
and you’ll see THAT reflected in the Emmys, not the Oscars.
now this is a comment i can get behind. because i cannot for the life of me understand the appeal beyond average, except perhaps for the obvious pandering to Hollywood trials and tribulations.what is exceptional about this film? i’m completely lost.
In fact, I believe Phantom Thread is his first and only movie that didn’t take place in California.
You’re forgetting his first film, Hard Eight, which, save for a brief scene that takes place in Niagara Falls, is entirely based in Nevada.
Well, Nevada is really just expansion pack content for California. Love the gaudy tourist traps of Hollywood Blvd? Wait til you see the Las Vegas strip!Love the scorching empty void of the Mojave? Wait til you see 95% of Nevada!
I couldn’t make it to a rest stop in the Mojave Desert, so I stopped to pee on the side of the highway. By the time I got back into the car the ground was dry again. It was very unsettling.
Reno representing! Sorry, there are just so few stories set here except for the explosion of divorce pictures from the 50s and 60s.
The Master MAY have some scenes in LA, but I’m not sure. It definitely wasn’t location specific movie the way so many of his other films are.
Yeah. This sounds too much like the mess that was Inherent Vice. I greatly prefer Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love.
Magnolia was indeed a great film! …shame about the other half an hour.[OK, so to be honest I’m not sure WHICH 30 minutes need to be cut from Magnolia, but definitely SOME 30 minutes needs to be cut. It’s great and then great and then great and great and then… fuck, is this still going? are we nearly there yet!? OK, it’s coming to an end, that’s great, this is great.]
Definitely his most indulgent piece. I could never bear to re watch it unlike all his other movies. A 30 minute re cut sounds about right.
I rewatched it with a friend who had never seen it before. For most of the running time I was thinking “this is great! Other than it being a bit intense, I don’t know why I always refused to re-watch this!”… then the spell wore off and we still had another 40 minutes to go…[in a complete coincidence, I happened to recently come across the origin story of one of the ‘weird coincidence’ things at the beginning of the film – the man murdered on Greenbury Hill by (allegedly) Green, Bury and Hill. It was actually the murder that sparked the Popish Plot (an episode of history that would be worth reading about for anyone interested in current politics…)]
I believe even PTA admitted that it should have been two different movies.
Just caught the back half of Dazed and Confused* last night and am now entirely in the mood for a new shaggy hangout movie with fun characters. Sign me up.
*Back off, I know that’s Linklater not PTA
I see that the Doors’ “Peace Frog” is included on the soundtrack here, but in my memories of FM radio, the DJ would have let the following tune, “Blue Sunday,” play out as well, in much the same way that FM radio frequently paired the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” with “Late Lament” (aka “Breathe Deep”). It probably goes without saying I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
Absolutely right. Or you never hear Heartbreaker without Living Loving Maid.
I seem to remember never being able to hear We Will Rock You without it segueing straight into We Are The Champions.
Yup – that’s another. Or the medleys on Abbey Road. When Sirius first started up years ago, they didn’t have things programmed just right and would chop that up. I remember hearing Mean Mr Mustard all by itself. Was nice and weird 🙂
It almost seems like a fever dream now, but I swear stations would play all 3 of ‘Sailing Shoes-Hey Julia-Sneaking Sally’ as one big, wonderful megamix.
I mean, has it not *always* been thus?
I have zero memory of Robert Palmer on the radio before Doctor.
Ooh la la, look at Mr. Humblebrag here boasting he can afford an FM radio.
sounds so up my alley it’s crazy. can’t wait.
Ha-im, goodbye-im, licorice pizza pie-im.Sounds good.
This looked good, promising soundtrack and always love the look of a brown, 70’s LA. But do we ever get to see the pizza? The trailer had a lack of licorice pizza.
I presume the title refers to a record store. I hope I’m not spoiling anything. Licorice Pizza is where Damone shows Rat how to pick up a woman, using a cardboard cutout Debby Harry.It’s also quite possible you knew this already, to which, Doh!
That would make total sense, as a record is black, flat and has lines on it!
I didn’t. Crazy.
I’d be surprised if they show a licorice pizza on film. Even as weird sex acts go, the vomiting really puts it over the edge. Wait, what?
Shit, I don’t know what’s worse, the clinically precise Anderson that created the god-awfully boring Master and Phantom Thread, or the entirely shambolic, disorganized Anderson that created the god-awfully boring Inherent Vice.I’m glad the dude went to everyone’s safe space, the 1970s, and a coming of age is always nice, but he’s blown his chances with me. I think I’ll just watch Almost Famous instead.
“famed producer John Peters”Jon Peters I believe
Eh, it’s not like he’s famous or anything.
i LOVED ‘inherent vice’. i loved the book more, but part of the pleasure of watching the movie was that feeling of “i can’t believe they actually made this”. i totally get why some don’t dig it, though.
if this delivers the same vibe, i’m all in
This looks like the first movie that will get me back into a theater.
Halloween Kills didn’t do it?
“One might think of that other Anderson” – the reviewer is referring to Paul W. S. Anderson, of course.
There is, after all, a touch of Johnny Cage in Gary
Not Roy Andersson, because he has an extra ‘s’ in his surname.
I’m probably thinking of Angry Anderson.
133 minutes?
Yooo this is exactly what I want to see
Finally, a coming of age movie set in the 1970’s. Was wondering when we would finally get around to making movies like this!I’ll still see it, of course.
I’m excited to hear this is a rambling, episodic tone piece. I think there are a few films that would be stronger if they jettisoned the entire obligation of plot. Like if Dazed and Confused dropped Pink signing a note in order to play football. Like, just let it be a bunch of vignettes. Which, I guess, what I hope this is.
But then D&C would never have given us “Neo McCarthyism,” and Matt McConaughey’s “The older you get, the more rules they’ll try to make you obey. You just got to keep L I V I N.”I really don’t want a D&C where the most memorable part is a thirty year (at least) old is saying how much he loves that “he get’s older, but high school girls stay the same age.” Some parts did not age as well as others.
+1 for Tom Waits.
YES. I love that I have no idea what he does in this movie.
No mention of any nipple ratios? Because based on the promo materials, I’m guessing 60:40 in favor of.
One of the Haim girls, so it’s probably nipples everywhere (at least one of their videos has all three in tank tops and panties throughout and it’s, errrr, highly distracting.)Now I’ve shown my credentials as a pig of a man, let me just add that I think the Haim sisters are phenomenally talented, the true heirs to Fanny, and I adore Este Haim, who’s a great bass player and an accredited ethnomusicologist.
There’s no frontal nudity.
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If it keeps HAIM from making ‘music’, I’m all for it.
Aka we’re foisting these two nepotism hires on you whether you like it or not.
“the fathers of famous men” – I literally had to check imdb for that. I was like, cool, they’ve got a son of a famous guy, what fun symmetry to to also stick in the father of a famous guy. I wonder which one? Long story short, it was a protracted walk to discover it’s – I assume – a typo.
I had no idea Tom Waits was in this until I watched the trailer just now. That’s pretty much an instant sell to me right there.
Have you forgotten about Mystery Men?
Coreys younger sister Alana is amazing in this, now i see where all the talent really was and is.
I know I’m late to the party, but this is a really great review.