After two years of COVID-induced cinematic famine, the latter half of 2021 laid out a smorgasbord of films for audiences to break their fast on. The spread was delightfully diverse, featuring domestic blockbusters and low-budget foreign films alike. Filmmakers crowded the table with dishes of every sort—decadent and fibrous, traditional and experimental. The starving cinephile hardly knew which fares were deserving of her voracious but finite appetite. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza made its way onto many of our plates. Fittingly named, the film is a quirky take on an American classic.
As enduring as pizza in the American diet, the white coming-of-age story is a staple of which audiences never tire. Anderson adds an unexpected topping to this tried-and-true foundation, his “licorice.” Diverging from the classic California boy-meets-girl narrative, he presents California boy-meets-woman. Licorice Pizza is a dish that warrants thoughtful digestion. Anderson intended the piece to convey the flavorfully rich combination of sweetness and sharpness that the title suggests. And it does; the film contains moments of tenderness and sardonicism, which, when ingested together, are delightful and moving.
However, Licorice Pizza also leaves indelible bitter aftertastes which cannot be discounted. The 10-year age gap between Alana (Alana Haim, of the band HAIM) and Gary (Cooper Hoffman, son of late actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and a startling racist subplot pollute the film. These details punctuate a series of otherwise charming and amiable vignettes, which resulted in the movie’s bifurcated public reception. In attempting to create a window into a ‘70s adolescent’s world, Anderson unintentionally created a far more telling window into his.
What cannot be denied is that Licorice Pizza is arresting. By virtue of its frenetic pacing and endearing leads, the film captures your attention and holds it. As each subplot stumbles into the next, the film’s freewheeling style evokes the gangling movements of adolescence. Alana Haim’s eponymous character, Gary’s 25-year-old love interest, drives the film’s energy. Despite never leading a movie before, Haim commands the screen with charismatic ferocity. She propels the plot like a guiding projectile: now seducing a waterbed customer, now mounting a motorcycle, now steering a gasless U-Haul backward down the San Fernando Valley. In her custom-made role, Haim proves herself a breakthrough star who can deftly shift gears between wit and vulnerability. With the dexterity of a seasoned actress, she darkens and brightens her countenance like a mood ring. Her skillfully employed intensity tows the film’s momentum when the plot stalls. In true ‘70s fashion, Haim—a real-life rockstar—anchors Licorice Pizza’s syncopated style.
Gary (Hoffman) also shines, though some of it is a reflection of Haim’s brightness. The two seem an incongruous pair but are possessed by the same cocky optimism of youth. You can’t help but root for them—up to a point. Gary is 15 and Alana 25, a crucial point brought up within the first minutes of the film and only once thereafter. Critics have denounced the movie for romanticizing grooming, to which defenders have responded that fictional characters should not be expected to have unassailable ethics. This, of course, is true. Necessary conflict can hardly arise without assailable breaches of ethics.
However, the age gap has almost no bearing on the main conflict of the movie. It is treated with glaring insignificance, which I initially took to be the auteur’s tacit way of not condescending to his audience—perhaps Anderson did not want to spell out a universally reprehensible detail as reprehensible. I thus assumed the age disparity to be the intentional fatal flaw in Gary and Alana’s rivalrous, quasi-romantic relationship. Or, I thought, perhaps Anderson planted it to illuminate the troubling norms of the era.
Apparently not. In a New York Times interview with reporter Kyle Buchanan, Anderson said of the relationship: “There’s no line that’s crossed, and there’s nothing but the right intentions. It would surprise me if there was some kind of kerfuffle about it, because there’s not that much there. That’s not the story that we made, in any kind of way. There isn’t a provocative bone in this film’s body.”
Not a bone, rather its entire skeleton. It’s troubling to see that Anderson is operating on a plane of understanding below his critics and defenders alike. While they debate the ethics of aestheticizing immoral behavior, he completely denies the existence of, and in that regard condones, said behavior. He’s yelling “Go fish!” at a poker tournament. To say that “[t]here’s no line that’s crossed” is shocking, as Alana kisses and exposes herself to Gary, a child. Anderson’s take throws Licorice Pizza into relief as an endorsement of grooming, one most dangerously justified by “the right intentions.”
Buchanan noted, “There’s at least one provocative bone in this film’s body. I’m thinking of the scenes with a white restaurateur, played by John Michael Higgins, where he talks to his Japanese wife in an accent so offensive that my audience actually gasped.” The surprising part of this sentence is that Buchanan’s audience “actually gasped.” Mine actually laughed, and I’m sure that many if not most audiences did the same. The only thing in Hollywood more trite and sloppily overdone than the white coming-of-age story is anti-Asian racism. Bravo to Anderson for so blithely combining the two.
I do not advocate fileting every “provocative bone” out of modern cinema. Indeed, these bones can provide the impetus for indictments of flagrant misconduct in society. Anderson claims that the Japanese restaurant subplot was such an indictment, a mockery of people who use offensive Asian accents. However, in contrast to the Joel Wachs subplot, which highlighted the oppressive heteronormative standards of the ‘70s, Anderson’s intention in using racialized accents was decidedly unclear. He presented the accent in a way that made the audience arbitrate its function as a joke or a critique. Artists are not obligated to editorialize the stereotypes they animate. But the public must recognize that not editorializing is editorializing. And it doesn’t help to lay your motives bare in a Times interview.
In response to Buchanan’s inquiry about the accent, Anderson said, “I think it would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021. You can’t have a crystal ball, you have to be honest to that time.” Fair enough. So does Anderson not know that there were fully-actualized people of color in the ‘70s? Perhaps his exclusion of them was yet another attempt at being “honest to that time,” or at least his notion of it.
After two years of COVID-induced cinematic famine, the latter half of 2021 laid out a smorgasbord of films for audiences to break their fast on. The spread was delightfully diverse, featuring domestic blockbusters and low-budget foreign films alike. Filmmakers crowded the table with dishes of every sort—decadent and fibrous, traditional and experimental. The starving cinephile hardly knew which fares were deserving of her voracious but finite appetite. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza made its way onto many of our plates. Fittingly named, the film is a quirky take on an American classic.
As enduring as pizza in the American diet, the white coming-of-age story is a staple of which audiences never tire. Anderson adds an unexpected topping to this tried-and-true foundation, his “licorice.” Diverging from the classic California boy-meets-girl narrative, he presents California boy-meets-woman. Licorice Pizza is a dish that warrants thoughtful digestion. Anderson intended the piece to convey the flavorfully rich combination of sweetness and sharpness that the title suggests. And it does; the film contains moments of tenderness and sardonicism, which, when ingested together, are delightful and moving.
However, Licorice Pizza also leaves indelible bitter aftertastes which cannot be discounted. The 10-year age gap between Alana (Alana Haim, of the band HAIM) and Gary (Cooper Hoffman, son of late actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and a startling racist subplot pollute the film. These details punctuate a series of otherwise charming and amiable vignettes, which resulted in the movie’s bifurcated public reception. In attempting to create a window into a ‘70s adolescent’s world, Anderson unintentionally created a far more telling window into his.
What cannot be denied is that Licorice Pizza is arresting. By virtue of its frenetic pacing and endearing leads, the film captures your attention and holds it. As each subplot stumbles into the next, the film’s freewheeling style evokes the gangling movements of adolescence. Alana Haim’s eponymous character, Gary’s 25-year-old love interest, drives the film’s energy. Despite never leading a movie before, Haim commands the screen with charismatic ferocity. She propels the plot like a guiding projectile: now seducing a waterbed customer, now mounting a motorcycle, now steering a gasless U-Haul backward down the San Fernando Valley. In her custom-made role, Haim proves herself a breakthrough star who can deftly shift gears between wit and vulnerability. With the dexterity of a seasoned actress, she darkens and brightens her countenance like a mood ring. Her skillfully employed intensity tows the film’s momentum when the plot stalls. In true ‘70s fashion, Haim—a real-life rockstar—anchors Licorice Pizza’s syncopated style.
Gary (Hoffman) also shines, though some of it is a reflection of Haim’s brightness. The two seem an incongruous pair but are possessed by the same cocky optimism of youth. You can’t help but root for them—up to a point. Gary is 15 and Alana 25, a crucial point brought up within the first minutes of the film and only once thereafter. Critics have denounced the movie for romanticizing grooming, to which defenders have responded that fictional characters should not be expected to have unassailable ethics. This, of course, is true. Necessary conflict can hardly arise without assailable breaches of ethics.
However, the age gap has almost no bearing on the main conflict of the movie. It is treated with glaring insignificance, which I initially took to be the auteur’s tacit way of not condescending to his audience—perhaps Anderson did not want to spell out a universally reprehensible detail as reprehensible. I thus assumed the age disparity to be the intentional fatal flaw in Gary and Alana’s rivalrous, quasi-romantic relationship. Or, I thought, perhaps Anderson planted it to illuminate the troubling norms of the era.
Apparently not. In a New York Times interview with reporter Kyle Buchanan, Anderson said of the relationship: “There’s no line that’s crossed, and there’s nothing but the right intentions. It would surprise me if there was some kind of kerfuffle about it, because there’s not that much there. That’s not the story that we made, in any kind of way. There isn’t a provocative bone in this film’s body.”
Not a bone, rather its entire skeleton. It’s troubling to see that Anderson is operating on a plane of understanding below his critics and defenders alike. While they debate the ethics of aestheticizing immoral behavior, he completely denies the existence of, and in that regard condones, said behavior. He’s yelling “Go fish!” at a poker tournament. To say that “[t]here’s no line that’s crossed” is shocking, as Alana kisses and exposes herself to Gary, a child. Anderson’s take throws Licorice Pizza into relief as an endorsement of grooming, one most dangerously justified by “the right intentions.”
Buchanan noted, “There’s at least one provocative bone in this film’s body. I’m thinking of the scenes with a white restaurateur, played by John Michael Higgins, where he talks to his Japanese wife in an accent so offensive that my audience actually gasped.” The surprising part of this sentence is that Buchanan’s audience “actually gasped.” Mine actually laughed, and I’m sure that many if not most audiences did the same. The only thing in Hollywood more trite and sloppily overdone than the white coming-of-age story is anti-Asian racism. Bravo to Anderson for so blithely combining the two.
I do not advocate fileting every “provocative bone” out of modern cinema. Indeed, these bones can provide the impetus for indictments of flagrant misconduct in society. Anderson claims that the Japanese restaurant subplot was such an indictment, a mockery of people who use offensive Asian accents. However, in contrast to the Joel Wachs subplot, which highlighted the oppressive heteronormative standards of the ‘70s, Anderson’s intention in using racialized accents was decidedly unclear. He presented the accent in a way that made the audience arbitrate its function as a joke or a critique. Artists are not obligated to editorialize the stereotypes they animate. But the public must recognize that not editorializing is editorializing. And it doesn’t help to lay your motives bare in a Times interview.
In response to Buchanan’s inquiry about the accent, Anderson said, “I think it would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021. You can’t have a crystal ball, you have to be honest to that time.” Fair enough. So does Anderson not know that there were fully-actualized people of color in the ‘70s? Perhaps his exclusion of them was yet another attempt at being “honest to that time,” or at least his notion of it.
