Gary, who’s constantly coming up with entrepreneurial side-hustles, starts a waterbed business that somehow becomes a pinball arcade by the movie’s end. Given the youth of its characters, it almost makes more sense for the story to take place over some hectically compressed period that only feels like it’s stretching out forever. It’s a Valley idyll that feels like it could encompass a stretch of time that’s anywhere from a few weeks to a year, the weather constant, school barely spoken of. But if it isn’t able to offer a perfectly offbeat romance on the level of Punch-Drunk Love and Phantom Thread, it’s not discardable, either. Licorice Pizza isn’t really Alana’s story, but it isn’t quite Gary’s, either, and the movie really needs to belong to one of them in order to feel a little less like an extended fantasy about wanting to boink one’s babysitter. Either Alana gets her shit together and puts away childish things, or this grown woman and teenage boy run off into the sunset together in a way that’s impossible to root for, while also obviously doomed. But these characters’ will-they-or-won’t-they poses a question for which there’s no satisfying answer. Fellow first-timer Hoffman, son of the later Philip Seymour, plays into Gary’s ex-child actor dynamic, pairing that eerily poised presence with a face still soft with boyishness. Haim, in her first acting role, is testily compelling, slipping between raw vulnerability and outbursts of disbelief in herself for glomming onto a high school friend group. It’s not that Alana and Gary are unlikable, though the movie tends to be more enchanted with the latter, its SoCal Max Fischer, while letting the former slip in and out of focus. Licorice Pizza is as much a meander through the peculiarities of the San Fernando Valley - close enough to Hollywood for unglamorous brushes with show business, and far enough away to feel like any other aimless suburb - in 1973 as it is about the two kids at its center, and its best parts are ones in which the kids are an excuse for some unpredictable digression rather than the center of one. Licorice Pizza - a movie as exasperating as it is delightful - could be described as an exploration of the unstable ground where Alana’s arrested development and Gary’s precociousness meet.Įxcept, and here’s the thing about Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, Alana and Gary’s untenable maybe-romance is the least compelling aspect of the movie. Given the actual men that Alana meets over the course of the movie, who range from the barely seen first boss who doles out casual ass slaps to a hilariously feral Bradley Cooper as hairdresser-turned-Barbra Streisand-boyfriend Jon Peters, it isn’t hard to understand why the playacted but harmless form of maturity affected by Gary might be appealing. It’s while at a portrait day that she meets Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a 15-year-old who’s doing his damndest to will himself right into middle age, and who makes a pass at her that’s so ridiculous - he invites her to swing by the upscale Tail o’ the Cock restaurant, where he claims to regularly dine - that she’s intrigued despite knowing better. She lives at home with her parents and her two older sisters (all played by the other members of the Haim family), and works for a school photographer, a job that isn’t helping in how it keeps her circulating among teenagers. Alana Kane, the tempestuous 25-year-old played by Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza, is waiting around for adulthood to happen to her.
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