Sweet and Salty

 Movies: Licorice Pizza

Director Paul Thomas Anderson is really not the director for me...and yet...I really WANT him to be the director for me. Boogie Nights is the only movie he's directed that I genuinely LOVE, and it took multiple viewings to get there. I've also seen Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread. These are all excellent films. But they're hard to warm up to. They're mostly about men, specifically men who range from immature to hard-to-love to straight-up sociopathic. PTA's movies read to me as horror films masquerading as drama. And I like horror, but there is something incredibly unsettling about all his films that makes them very uncomfortable to watch.

PTA's latest, Licorice Pizza, seems like an easy movie to love. Set in 1973 in the San Fernando Valley, the film focuses on the friendship between 25 year old Alana (Alana Haim, best known for being a member of Haim) and 15-going on-16 year old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman). The two meet as Gary is getting his high school picture taken--Alana works for the company that takes the photos. They engage in a natural, easy banter. It's clear that Gary has a crush on Alana, who informs him that it would be "illegal" for them to be together.

The rest of the film chronicles their adventures separately and apart. Gary is a child actor and entrepreneur who is constantly coming up with harebrained business schemes, such as selling waterbeds, to make a quick buck. Alana is still living at home with her parents and desperately trying to leave the nest and also get men to like her. It was clear, at least to me, that Alana's self-esteem is shit. And I think that's why she keeps finding herself drawn to a non-legal teenager who thinks she's hot.

Guys, look. The age gap thing is fucking weird. And this is coming from someone who defends the age gap in Call Me By Your Name (which is 17/24, which feels worlds different than 15/25) It also feels sooooo unnecessary to the film. Everything about Alana screams "18 or 19 year old". She looks young, she's immature and unsure of herself, she lives with her parents, etc. Why couldn't PTA have made her just a tich younger. Even a 15/19 age gap would feel much less gross and made a lot more sense.

I think both the age gap and Alana's immaturity really made it difficult to enjoy this movie. While the two don't kiss until the very end...they do in fact kiss, which suggests that they will do more. And while I would say I am not quite as hard line against relationships between older teens and young 20-somethings, this is honestly a romance you can't feel good about. Alana only wants to be with Gary because he thinks she's pretty and because men her own age and older have failed her. And that's a sad basis for a romance right there. Is Alana a predator? Perhaps! But I think she is just a sad person more than anything else.

I still have to give the movie a B rating because it has many genuinely hilarious moments. There's a scene where Alana and Gary install a waterbed in the home of Jon Peters (a real life film producer), played by Bradley Cooper. Cooper plays Peters as a narcissistic psycho who tells Gary that if they fuck up his house he will kill his entire family. They end up fucking up his house and then fucking up his car, only to run out of gas with their giant truck parked right next to the car, forcing Alana to put the truck in neutral and go backwards down a giant, curving hill using only momentum. It's a great scene. 

Other scenes are not so great, such as a weird joke where a white guy who owns a Japanese restaurant that Gary frequents uses a "Japanese accent" to ask his (non-English speaking) Japanese wife what she thinks about various marketing strategies for the restaurant. This is another unnecessary, offensive thing about this movie. Also, Sean Penn is in the movie and he just straight-up sucks. I think what is really disappointing about Licorice Pizza is that the *potential* for a truly great movie is there--great acting, funny script, and a generally loose, fun vibe all around. But between the age gap romance, the casually racist jokes, and other dumb directorial choices, the film simply doesn't live up to it's potential.

I'm giving it a B, but it's a low B. 

Grade: B