Licorice Pizza (2021, R)

I did pretty good this year, in more ways than one. I was able to see every Oscar nominee in my top nine categories, wrapping up just under the wire. And it took me all the way until the end to find a movie that was the equivalent of an Arrested Development-style “her?” Sorry, Licorice Pizza, but you’re that movie for me.

Gary Valentine, a 15-year-old Hollywood actor, takes a chance and begs one of the women working at his school picture day to go out for dinner with him. Alana repeatedly tells him he’s a child, but his charm (pushiness?) amuses her despite herself, and she shows up at the restaurant. As their friendship/sort-of-more develops, they get into all sorts of adventures in 1970s Hollywood, mostly involving Gary’s enthusiastic business ventures.

In fairness, I’m writing this review almost immediately after watching the film, and I know movies sometimes improve in my estimation after I have time to think about them. Case in point, Encanto, my beloved—although I do not foresee Licorice Pizza rising to Encanto levels in my eyes. Additionally, all I really knew about the film going in, other than a general nostalgia/Americana vibe and maybe a love story, was that it featured some really tactless, racist jokes about Asian women. Ostensibly, the jokes are, “Haha, look at how tactless and racist the ‘70s were!”, but when Asian Americans are still being attacked and harassed a year after the Atlanta shootings, I don’t have any patience for those kinds of “jokes.”

But onto the rest of the film. Honestly, I’m not quite sure what to say. I didn’t connect with this film on virtually any level. I suppose I can make some sort of sense out of the Best Picture nomination, since Hollywood loves movies about itself (which, in a funny way, is a compelling demonstration of “representation matters.”) I’ll grant you the Best Director nomination—Paul Thomas Anderson is an acclaimed director, I’ve been impressed with some of his previous Oscar films, and the direction is very good. But I can’t understand the Best Original Screenplay nomination at all. The story is incredibly meandering, but not in a way that ultimately feels meaningful, and it lurches from one improbable scenario to another in such a way that, at first, I kept expecting a reveal that this or that scene was actually a dream sequence.

People can complain about “wokeness” in movies, but personally, I’m not interested in jokes about interchangeable Asian women, and I’m not interested in a film whose most tangible throughline is the question of whether or not this 25-year-old woman is going to “date” this 15-year-old boy. There are admittedly some interesting dynamics going on—because of Gary’s early Hollywood success, he often seems older than his age, and Alana, who hasn’t really gotten her life together, seems younger—but it’s so weird and uncomfortable. There are numerous times when I wanted to tell at Alana, “Why are you putting up with this 15-year-old kid and his shit?!”

Both the leads are making their feature film debuts here. Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) plays Gary, and I think he mostly captures Gary’s deceptive sheen of “maturity” over his adolescent contradictions. Alana Haim turns in a pretty decent performance as Alana, although the script pulls her character in a lot of different directions. The movie features cameos from the likes of Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Christine Ebersole, and Tom Waits.

Warnings

Sexual content, language, drinking/smoking/drug use, brief scenes of violence, racist/sex “humor,” and thematic elements (including a will-they-won’t-they relationship between an adult and a minor.)