Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, the Oscar-nominated film Licorice Pizza, analyzes love’s simultaneously frustrating and elating nature by bringing to life the various adventures of 15-year-old actor/hustler Gary Valentine and 25-year-old valley girl Alana Kane (played by Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim, respectively, both making their acting debuts) in 1973. In the film, the pair is not a couple, for obvious reasons, but Gary is immediately smitten with Alana, a photographer’s assistant helping to take pictures at his high school gymnasium. He’s a fairly prolific child actor, a larger-than life personality clearly shaped by his experiences in showbusiness, hitting on an actual adult.
Through the perspective of these two young, flawed individuals, Licorice Pizza is a film that captures the rapturously joyful confusion of youth more than has any other this year, and joins the echelons of films such as American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused and Fast Times at Ridgemont High in being an all-time watermark of youth in cinema.
Gary is a sort of boy-man, a child whose lifestyle and ambition have given him the confidence, presence and business acumen of a man. Alana is a woman-girl, working a dead-end job meant for teenagers, simultaneously preoccupied by her own perceived lack of adult success, while still engaging in behavior that prevents her from fulfilling her own potential. “You’ve got to stop fighting with everyone,” Alana’s sister calmly advises her after a family dinner gone bad. “Oh, fuck off, Danielle!” Alana yells before storming off.
Despite attempting to fend off his advances, Alana actually shows up when Gary invites her for dinner at his preferred establishment, legendary San Fernando Valley watering hole Tail O’ the Cock. Alana is amused by Gary’s tenacity and confidence, but she realistically tells him that he is destined to be far more successful than she is. “Oh, I’m not going to forget you,” he says. “Just like you’re not going to forget me.”
While walking each other home, Alana sets the boundary by telling Gary: “We’re not boyfriend/girlfriend. Remember that.”
One thing leads to another, and Alana and Gary end up in the throes of a deep and powerful friendship, the kind that overshadows most romances. Throughout the next two cinematic hours, the pair undergo a series of adventures — Gary starts a waterbed company, Alana signs up to be a volunteer at the campaign office of Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), a city councilman running for mayor, and the pair deliver a waterbed to the lavish home of coked-out Hollywood producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper).
One could argue that at first, Gary is obsessed, not in love, and that the one most invested is Alana. After all, she didn’t have to meet Gary at Tail O’ The Cock or exert any mental energy regarding his existence after walking out of the gym. Yet, somehow, Alana finds direction under Gary’s simultaneously mature-for-his-age yet childish moral compass. Throughout the film, Alana begins to seek the attention of several men closer to her age, including one of Gary’s older fellow actors and a fellow campaign volunteer, leading to one after another falling short of Alana’s expectations or needs.
In the film’s heartbreaking emotional climax, Alana is called by Wachs to join him for a drink, only for it to be revealed that he invited her over with the purpose of her pretending to be the girlfriend of his partner Matthew. As Alana drops Matthew off at his home, he asks if she herself has a man in her life.
“Is he a shit?” Matthew asks Alana tearfully. “Yes,” she answers. “They’re all shits, aren’t they?” He asks back.
It’s a pivotal moment in the film’s perspective, as every adult in the movie up to this point has been a shithead. All of them, including Gary and Alana (except for maybe Gary’s mother). Every adult character in the film has some kind of skewed sense of right and wrong. Two particularly controversial scenes highlighting this dynamic feature restaurateur Jerry Fricks (John Michel Higgins) who, despite his politeness and close business relationship with Gary and his mother, speaks to his Japanese wives in an exaggerated Japanese accent while stating that he does not actually speak Japanese. Shithead.
Wachs, a young politician whose youth and inexperience are substituted for ambition and sincerity is undercut by the fact that he’s hiding from the world his romantic relationship with a man and subsequently hurting the one person he presumably loves. “That’s just not how the world works,” Wachs says defensively to Matthew.
No matter how much the characters in the film try to do the right thing, the right thing is always in conflict with either their own interests, the interests of those around them, or what is possible given the circumstances, leading to that skewed morality. It's not backwards, just skewed. In an era of dark politics, Gary and Alana are able to persist by simply following their own respective paths, skewed as they might be.
The era’s darkness is seen through Gary and Alana’s alternatingly innocent and passive vantage points. Vietnam is mentioned only once by Alana’s potential boyfriend at a family dinner gone wrong, and over breakfast, Alana watches President Nixon on TV saying that people will be forced “to use less fuel than they are accustomed.” While the adults in the story are presumably off-camera worrying about their ability to get to work or take their kids to school, Alana realizes that the only direct effect of the oil embargo on them will be via the oil-based vinyl waterbeds. Gary is even more clueless, unaware of what the beds are even made of.
In the ensuing calamity that presumably sweeps the nation, Gary and Alana are only affected when they run out of gas. Twice. During the film’s "middle" act, Alana and Gary find themselves apart. Alana childishly becomes jealous of the fact that Gary is finally off philandering with girls his own age, and Gary childishly becomes upset with Alana when he discovers that she’s willing to appear nude for the acting roles he suggests she try out for. Alana then finds herself auditioning for a role with fictional Hollywood star Jack Holden (inspired by actor William Holden, played brilliantly by Sean Penn) when the grizzled veteran charms her into joining him for dinner and drinks at — where else? — Tail O’ the Cock. Alana, in the company of a powerful, confident and steadfast man quickly realizes that he, too, is a shithead. Not for the reasons most men in those positions of power turn out to be shitheads, but for a far more disappointing reason to Alana: he, too, is a man-child.
Holden spots his old director Rex Blau (American singer/songwriting/treasure Tom Waits) and the two drunkenly reminisce, fight with spoons and plan a motorcycle jump on the golf course next to the restaurant. Confused and drunk on martinis, Alana desperately turns to Holden and says, “I don’t understand, but I’m sexy, right?”
Gary is calmly watching all of this from the next table, seething with jealousy, but calm in his response, or lack of one. “Assassin’s focus,” he tells his friend Mark. “Gritted teeth and fixed bayonets.” Alana is aware that Gary is watching and leans hard into the attention of the two men. Ironically, in trying to make Gary jealous, she's behaving like a child. Alana wants to have her cake and eat it, too. She has an ambitious sense of direction and desire for someone to worship the ground she walks on.
Alana often finds herself at odds with Gary and his friends’ interests, because, being 15-year-olds, Gary and his friends are, well, stupid — stupid in the way that literally every 15-year-old is stupid compared to a 25-year-old. Gary only knows so much and has so much to learn.
This is proven throughout the film’s vignettes, as Gary and Alana’s widely different reactions to similar situations drive a wedge between them, leading up to the film’s third act. “The world doesn’t revolve around Gary Valentine and his friends,” she tells him at one point. “It does,” he asserts.
If anything, the film’s shaggy non-narrative-driven nature reinforces its commitment to reality. Some moments (like the stupendous Sorcerer-like truck-driving scene) mirror those that pepper one’s life story with unforgettable memories, while other moments of tension are deflated, like the sigh of relief one breathes when real life is not as dramatic as the movies. Seeing the strange “Number 12 Guy” walk into the campaign office with a scowl and a large bag makes you nervous that bullets are about to fly and Alana may be a casualty. In actuality, his nefarious interests are more related to exposing Wachs’ secret. Seeing Alana aboard Holden’s motorcycle immediately leads you to fear that a terrible accident is about to occur, and once again, Alana once again may be a casualty. In actuality, she quickly falls of the motorcycle as soon as he takes off, allowing him to engage in his childish stunt while Gary immediately runs to her aid.
In a typical adult Hollywood-hot-pink-roman-candle-firework love story, Gary and Alana’s reunion is the moment the main characters would consummate their love in a fit of physical passion, leading to the inevitable downfall that results in the magical tension being broken. Instead, Gary and Alana walk away from the potential smoldering wreckage by spending the night together platonically on a waterbed, with the only physical contact between the two being the touching of their pinky fingers. With the aid of Paul McCartney & Wings’ gushingly passionate rocker “Let Me Roll It” framing the duo’s bond, Anderson somehow makes this scene more romantic and exciting than nearly any traditional love scene in cinema history.
In the tradition of other great films that analyze the complicated nature of love itself (be it Anderson’s own Punch-Drunk Love or something as light as Love Actually), the "love" between Alana and Gary is not one of sweeping drama or even one of mature romance, but more like the way John Mayer once described it in the song "Bold As Love": “I’ve-got-your-back-love.”
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The scene also corrects the film’s moral compass. Both Alana and Gary have the easy opportunity to cross the line, yet neither do. As Gary kneels to her aid, Alana, in a drunken daze, leans up and in, looks deep into Gary’s eyes, and simply lets him help her up and away. Later, Gary, drunk with the moment, looks over at Alana asleep beside him on the waterbed, reaches over to grab her breast, and stops himself from going through with it.
In Cameron Crowe’s 2000 music film Almost Famous, protagonist and teenage rock journalist William Miller, who's lamenting the non-existence of his romance with "band-aid" Penny Lane and the apparent failure of his writing assignment, receives valuable advice over the phone from his mentor, legendary music critic Lester Bangs (played by Cooper Hoffman's father, the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman).
“We are uncool,” Bangs asserts. “Women will always be problems for guys like us. Most of the great art in the world is about that very problem. That’s what great art is about: guilt, longing, love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love … The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone when you’re uncool.”
In the tradition of other great films that analyze the complicated nature of love itself (be it Anderson’s own Punch-Drunk Love or something as light as Love Actually), the "love" between Alana and Gary is not one of sweeping drama or even one of mature romance, but more like the way John Mayer once described it in the song "Bold As Love": “I’ve-got-your-back-love.”
Licorice Pizza purports that, much like real life, complicated love is not a miserable experience in any way but a joyous, indescribable feeling that turns frustrating when circumstance determines that two people in love are not able to actually be together. In the moments leading up to the film’s ending, Gary excitedly announces the presence of “Ms. Alana Valentine” to the patrons of his pinball palace. Upon which, she rightfully shakes her head and says “Idiot.”
One can probably argue that the film’s actual ending is the one moment that the film is allowed to turn into a fantasy. Whether that’s what actually happens or whether it's a figment of Alana and/or Gary’s imaginations is irrelevant. Their friendship is unshakable, and that’s all that matters.
