Shortly after returning home from seeing Licorice Pizza in theaters, I found that I had no idea what the title was referencing. Naturally I Googled it, and found that many other people had asked the same thing. The top result offered the following explanation:
“Licorice Pizza is actually named after a famous SoCal record store that existed in the late '70s and '80s, according to Thrillist. The term is also slang for vinyl records, which have the appearance of shiny, black licorice and are the size of a small pizza.”
It’s fitting in another way: licorice is a candy that most people hate, but almost everyone likes pizza.
Before I even watched the trailer back in May 2021 I was hearing buzz about this movie, and not because it was made by one of our most critically acclaimed directors, Paul Thomas Anderson. Rather, the opinions were a drain-circling indictment against the morality of portraying what I’ll refer to as “age gap relationships”.
If you are unaware, much of the plot of Licorice Pizza centers around a romance of confusion between a 28 year old woman (played by Alana Haim, of the band HAIM) - who tells everyone she is 25 - and a 15 year old boy (played by Cooper Hoffman, the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman). These ages are either alluded to or confirmed in various scenes of the film, but we learn this in the first fifteen minutes. Their names are Alana (lol*) and Gary, respectively.
I loved the movie, and enjoyed pretty much all of it, thought I can concede to it being a smidge too long. I’m primarily interested in the role that the perceived morality of the plot has to do with it’s critical reception - shortly after seeing it, I took to my Instagram stories to say how much I enjoyed it, and several of my friends (whose taste I really do trust) offered genuine criticisms that had nothing to do with the discourse I’ve referenced above.
**From this point forward, there are spoilers! **
First, I should address my own biases towards loving this movie. Regular readers of this newsletter may remember my craving for morally ambivalent women characters. Thus, I am not at all put off by Alana, and I found her character wholly real and captivating. Living in Encino in 1973 with her parents and older sisters, Alana is stuck between a rock and a hard place. She hasn’t succeeded at adulthood - she has few romantic prospects and is working as a high school yearbook photographer, which is where she meets 15 year old Gary.
It’s hugely important to recognize what Alana’s lack of romantic prospects means in 1973 vs. 2021. Licorice Pizza is a film that is truly of the era it is inserting us into, rather than dragging today’s politics into a schema of the world where they simply would not fit. As a result, it’s factually true that in 1973, men decided how high women would rise in their lives. Without a husband to move in with, many women could not escape the family home. My own mother, a hippie-turned-Boomer to a tee, used to tell me this is why she bothered marrying her first husband. She had a job, she technically was the one making money, but at the time it was sociologically unfathomable for her to make a decision like that on her own. She would have been perceived as weirder for moving out alone and being a single-income household of one than she would have been by living with her parents forever. I would say the idea of women being held hostage by gender norms is at the core of the film, far more so than the much-hyped question of whether or not it’s acceptable for a 15 and a 25 year old to have a (fictional) romantic relationship.
Gary himself at 15, is far more successful than anyone else Alana knows (with the exception of an Encino mayoral candidate that comes into play later on in the film). A child star who is aging out of ‘kid’ movies, he has his own mother working for him and has new business ideas every week. With no father at home, he becomes “the man of the house” and strikes out on his own, starting a waterbed business that eventually goes left because of the gas shortage. In many ways, he’s more mature than Alana. But in others, he’s incredibly childish. One of the most poignant scenes for me involved Alana and Gary both reading the newspaper, where she is making the connection that the waterbed casings, made of vinyl, are going to be hugely affected by the gas shortage and will essentially sink the business. Meanwhile, Gary is perusing the classifieds, oblivious.
The film also explores older men’s attitude towards young women, as evidenced by Alana’s one-night dalliance with a much older superstar (Jack Holden played by Sean Penn). It’s funny in contrast to her and Gary’s situationship: it’s a version of the story we’re all more comfortable with largely because of internalized misogyny, the double standard personified. Despite that, we’re just as capable of being grossed out by Holden’s gigantic male ego and old-guy-halfheartedly-chasing-tail routine. Even if he is capable of holding court, he has nothing on Gary in the charm department.
Another point of criticism was how the celebrity cameos landed, in fact a near perfect 50/50 split in the replies I got from my (small) audience. Some found this gimmicky, as if Anderson was trying to cram in as many A-listers in as possible opposite these new-to-Hollywood leads, but they also landed genuinely for me. I was especially delighted by Bradley Cooper’s role, as a sort of A-list playboy type trying to endure monogamy with Barbara Streisand, who despite never appearing, I mentally cast as Lady Gaga in this cinematic universe. Subsequently, I even wondered if Anderson himself expected us to do that because of A Star is Born, which originally came out in 1976 starring Striesand and was remade in 2018 starring Gaga. There’s also Gaga’s own natural resemblance to Streisand; her type of beauty and look. I could be reaching too far, but I thought the scene where Alana is at the casting agency and is told she’s ‘beautiful, with a very Jewish nose!' might also be a nod to this, a sign of the changing times, and of how much has shifted between then and now.
The women’s liberation dynamic comes into play throughout the film, outside of merely the relationship between Alana and Gary. Particularly of note to that point, I thought, was a scene of egregious racism on the part of a white business man towards his Asian wife. The businessman (played by John Michael Higgins), who is clearly supposed to be repulsive to the viewer, uses a very racist accent when in a meeting with other characters about the marketing for his restaurant, which appears to be lifting several different Asian cultures into one easily-digestible “theme” to attract customers. But the point of the scene is this: this man divorces his first Asian wife (who came up with the idea for the restaurant herself) for another Asian woman who does not speak English, making it impossible for them to truly communicate.
This kind of drives home what I believe is PTA’s point: in the 1970’s, even women who were smarter than their husbands couldn’t really escape them without their permission. It’s frustrating as all hell.
The criticism that lands better for me is that the film is self-indulgent, perhaps a preview of PTA as he enters his Tarantino years (though I sincerely hope not): long-winded, overly nostalgic for his own youth, spending too long on one scene, and making everything too aesthetically pleasing. This does seem to be what old male directors do at the tail-end of their career, but for me it worked in a way that say, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood could never work.
I’m not sure what PTA wants us to think about Alana and Gary, but personally as a viewer, I found myself feeling as conflicted as Alana herself: rooting for this romance in my heart, while my brain repeatedly slapped me on the wrist because it is logically ‘wrong’ for them to be together. As the movie continued, I did become concerned with how they would handle the prospect of a sex scene.
I needn’t have worried - even PTA is not that brave.
*Footnote to add that I looooved the winking irony of the Haim sister characters all using their real first names. A delight, and a further meta-commentary on the pre-conceived notions we have of existing celebrities, not unlike the Gaga aside that went through my own head.