2022 Best Picture Review: Licorice Pizza
Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, left) talks with Alana Kane (Alana Haim, right). Licorice Pizza is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 94th Academy Awards.
It’s Tom’s final review! This time, it’s Licorice Pizza, the coming-of-age film by Paul Thomas Anderson. Licorice Pizza stars Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, as an entrepreneurial sixteen-year-old “shooting his shot” with the twenty-five-year-old Alana, played by Alana Haim of the band HAIM.
“You’re sweet, Gary. You’re going to be rich in a mansion by the time you’re sixteen. I’m going to be here taking photos of kids for their yearbooks when I’m thirty. You’re never going to remember me.”
If you haven’t heard of Licorice Pizza, you probably aren’t on Twitter. Which is definitely a good thing for your mental health and your sanity. But if you, like me, have seen the social media discourse over the film, you surely have an opinion, whether or not you’ve seen it. But I’ll get to that later! I’m going to start with the basics: Licorice Pizza is the ninth film from acclaimed auteur Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood). It’s a coming-of-age film set in the mid-1970s in Los Angeles, starring Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman (both in their debut film roles), with supporting roles played by established stars like Bradley Cooper and Sean Penn, as well as Tom Waits and Benny Safdie. Haim plays Alana Kane, a 25-year-old photographer’s assistant who hasn’t lived up to her own expectations in life and is sort of a lost soul. Hoffman plays Gary Valentine, a 15-year-old high school student who doubles, weirdly, as a salesman of assorted products.
The opening scene hits the premise on the nose: the acne-laden Gary, standing in line for his school photo, sees Alana walking around the gymnasium and immediately tries to strike up a conversation with her to ask her on a date. Being ten years older than him, Alana rebuffs the fast-talking Gary, but you can tell she’s at least flattered, if not interested. The movie continues as Gary grows into his own as a salesman, going from waterbeds to pinball machines and Alana stays more or less in the same place for a lot of the film. This is where it gets a little bit iffy. The crux of the film is a “will-they-won’t-they” relationship between Alana (who is, again, 25) and Gary (15) and that’s…tough.
There are some rationales, and I understand where PTA was coming from with this one: first, if you are familiar with his movies, he tends to feature relationships that are simply metaphors for larger ideas (i.e., Phantom Thread and masculinity). Second, throughout the film, Gary is the pursuer. There is no power dynamic between Gary and Alana in which the older person is giving chase. Gary acts like he’s a 35-year-old used car salesman for most of the movie. And third, I think the point is that…it’s the '70s. Things were different back then. Flings were different back then. So these are what I think Anderson’s ideas were as he crafted a quasi-romance between a 25-year-old and a 15-year-old. That being said, I was a bit uncomfortable as I was watching, just knowing the age gap between the two characters. I did my best to put it aside in the name of Art, but it definitely hangs over the film. But for now I’m going to leave this aspect alone. Just look it up online and you’ll see plenty of opinions. I’m not going to be saying anything you haven’t heard before.
Pivoting a bit, I just want to give a ton of credit to both Haim and Hoffman for carrying this movie. First, Haim. You might know her from her other job as the youngest sister who plays guitar and keyboard, and also sings, in the alt rock trio HAIM. Paul Thomas Anderson, a friend of the Haim family, has directed a slew of HAIM music videos and wrote Licorice Pizza with Alana in mind. So what is this character like? As Haim told NPR, “Alana Kane is a little unhinged …. She’s very snappy. She will rip your head off at a moment’s notice. But she’ll also protect the people that she loves.” And that’s true throughout the film - Alana’s wit is a large part of why Gary is infatuated with her. Including Haim’s entire family - Este, Danielle, mother Donna, and father Moti - was a nice idea to get Haim more comfortable in front of the camera, but I’m not sure she even really needed it. Her personality is magnetic throughout.
Her counterpart, Cooper Hoffman, is the son of longtime PTA collaborator, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. During our recent viewings of some 2000s movies for our next bracket, we’ve become re-acquainted with PSH’s catalogue, including his varied compelling roles in Capote (for which he won Best Actor), Almost Famous, and Doubt. The man was truly underappreciated while he was here, but fortunately we still have his son Cooper.
Cooper has no business being as good as he is in this movie. In fact, he didn’t even want to be. “I don’t think I ever really considered [acting] a possibility. I was always kind of scared to enter that arena because my dad did it so well,” Hoffman told ABC News. “But the second I read with Paul and Alana, I kind of got so emotional. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I need to do this.’” And in a film by a veteran filmmaker starring the likes of Sean Penn and Bradley Cooper, it’s Cooper Hoffman who jumps off the screen - he is the presence that I kept wanting to see more of. From his smooth-talking (as he notes about himself, “ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a song-and-dance man”) to the constant running and smiling, to the assorted sales schemes he cooks up, Gary is the infectious heart of the film. Even though there’s only one Gary Valentine in my heart, Cooper Hoffman does an admirable job of forcing me to make room for a second one. I’m really excited to see what Hoffman can do in the future.
One of Hoffman’s best scenes is opposite an unhinged Bradley Cooper, playing Jon Peters (a real, terrible person). Peters, one of the examples in the film of why growing up and adulthood aren’t so appealing, is a raging monster that Alana and Gary try to avoid at all costs. Likewise, Sean Penn and Tom Waits play Jack Holden and Rex Blau, also based on real people, who set a ramp on fire as Holden bucks Alana off of a motorcycle before trying to do the stunt in front of a couple dozen people. The adults in this film are barely adults, and their caricatures lend themselves to the theme in the film of avoiding adulthood. It’s the committed performances of stars like Cooper, Penn, and Waits that make this ultimately successful. You can tell just by their performances that actors love working for Paul Thomas Anderson. There’s even an extra special cameo that I won’t spoil here (and that you probably won’t even pick up on it until you look it up, like I did). Just keep an eye out for Herman Munster.
Outside of the cast, the film succeeds with its soundtrack and cinematography. Curated by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, the soundtrack places you directly in the mid-’70s, from “But You’re Mine” by Sonny & Cher to “Let Me Roll It” by Paul McCartney and Wings to “Life on Mars?” by David Bowie (the song in the excellent trailer for the film), the soundtrack is as much a character in the film as Gary and Alana. After all, the movie is about Paul Thomas Anderson’s reverence for the Los Angeles of his childhood. The cinematography works the same way: it’s fuzzy, it’s full of interesting light and colors, and it brings LA to life. Co-cinematographer Michael Bauman spoke about how he and Anderson got a lot of their inspiration from ‘70s films like 1973’s American Graffiti to try to capture the time period and how that helped to bring Anderson’s vision of his childhood LA to screen. It’s a beautifully shot movie with a retro style.
However, an issue with that reverence is the way that Anderson handles the treatment of Asian-Americans. This is the other controversy I alluded to earlier. There’s a white character named Jerry Frick, who is the owner of a Japanese restaurant and who has a Japanese wife named Mioko. In two separate scenes, he speaks to his wife (later, a different wife named Kimiko) in an obnoxiously offensive Japanese accent, to which the wife responds in non-subtitled Japanese. It’s clear to me that the butt of the joke is Frick, because he looks like a total idiot, but it doesn’t really fit with the nostalgic theme of the film. I personally don’t think that Anderson meant to punch down at Asian-Americans. It seemed like a throwaway joke at the expense of Frick, but I don’t think it went far enough in condemning Frick’s behavior or uplifting his wives (or even portray any other meaningful Asian-American role in the film although the Asian-American presence was exploding in Los Angeles at the time). But I suppose I’m not exactly in a position to determine Anderson’s intent or really weigh in on the matter with any meaningful sway. For a better take on this from someone who is actually an Asian-American woman, you can read this Hollywood Reporter article on the subject by Rebecca Sun.
Overall, I really enjoyed this movie, but I’m not sure it’s going to stick with me like Anderson’s other films outside of the general oeuvre of Hoffman, Haim, and the cinematography. While I really liked it as I was watching, I have seen people’s opinions on the age gap and the Asian-American controversy and they’ve admittedly marred my opinion to some degree. I liked the film well enough, but not enough to dig my heels in and defend either of PTA’s choices too voraciously. But it was entertaining and I would probably re-watch it just for Cooper Hoffman alone.
Rating: 8/10