*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Ryan Coleman’s review here.*
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, there are a few learned social truths that, after years of meeting transplants or being transplanted, you realize the rest of the world neither knows of, nor abides by. The Valley is a bubble, within which life is sterile and magnified. A place where you feel terribly close to and impossibly far from everything. If you aren’t someone, you know someone, and if you don’t know someone, you might know someone’s kid. It’s where social hierarchies orient themselves around which side of the boulevard or Encino you grew up on… and where yellow neon signs wrapped around corner liquor stores feel like landmarks, aspirational associations with the infinite and indecent city over the hill.
I want to preface my review of Licorice Pizza with the following disclosure: I am a girl (woman: 26) from the Valley, born at a Tarzana hospital, raised off Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, with a BA from UCLA and an honest, if not absolutely derivative affinity for the 1970s. So, when I first heard Licorice Pizza was being made, my initial reaction was both giddy anticipation and a silent/shameful frustration that I hadn’t been considered to be in it—a line of thinking that only someone who grew up in the Valley might have. I, who have never acted in anything except a children’s production of RENT, felt jilted. What I mean to say is, I was designed to enjoy this movie. And, as I arrived at the screening, parking my 2008 Prius on the roof of the Broxton parking garage in Westwood, I only wanted to love it. The poster of leading actress and Valley native, Alana Haim, sky high on The Fox Theater tower felt like a victory flag— a Valley heroine, towering above all the cool kids on the city side.
For the most part, I did love Licorice Pizza. Directed by Valley legend, Paul Thomas Anderson, the film dashes around what feels like a years-long San Fernando Valley summer. Set in Los Angeles in the seventies (like Anderson’s Inherent Vice and Boogie Nights) and shot on physical film stock, the 35 mm picture is instantly nostalgic. At the center of the film is Alana Haim’s brilliant and effortless portrayal of Alana Kane, a brash and sweetly naive 25-year-old photo-assistant searching for relevance amidst the aimlessness of the suburbs. She is pursued by 15-year-old Gary Valentine (played by Cooper Hoffman), a latchkey child actor with little supervision and a limitless entrepreneurial spirit. Kane initially scoffs at Valentine’s advances, but becomes increasingly enamored with the charms of his mild celebrity, and his abiding adolescent infatuation with her. When Kane accompanies Valentine on a New York press trip, she giddily interjects to a stranger in the audience, “I’m his chaperone” — pride by association.
The film is a chase: Valentine chasing Kane, both chasing opportunities, and then, everyone literally running during the oil/gas shortage of the late seventies. In an abbreviated storyline that nods to the less-nostalgic realities of the period’s antiquated social climate, Kane even joins a race, volunteering for a young progressive mayoral candidate, Joel Wachs (Ben Safdie). But, in the end, Kane and Valentine fittingly run into one another, the film having been the events of their worlds colliding.
Kane’s relationship with Valentine tethers her at once to her youth, and to the ageless promise of a career in Hollywood, two things especially meaningful in the Valley, where it’s difficult to ever escape who you were in the second grade, and a famous friend is often more useful than a degree… or talent. Also, their controversial age-gap contracts when one considers the warping nature of celebrity. Despite Valentine’s youth, his film credits age him prematurely, giving him augmented access to spaces deemed “adult.” Not yet old enough to drive, he can leverage his clout at Tail O’ The Cock, the steak-house that isn’t quite Musso & Frank’s, but is teeming with industry folks —he can start a business, or three, his fame serving as collateral.
Their connection —friendly, romantic, and, at times, fraternal— propels them into various schemes. Whether selling waterbeds to a hysterical Hollywood producer, Jon Peters (played by Bradley Cooper) or escaping Kane’s casting dinner date with actor Jack Holden (Sean Penn) and his old stunt-loving hype man Rex Blau (Tom Waits), Kane and Valentine realize the utility and security of their union. With the revelation of each A-list supporting actor, I couldn’t help but think of Anderson calling in every friend and favor for his hometown epic. Cooper, Penn, and Waits all deliver over-the-top performances as if trying to one-up each others’ farce and each embodying the toxic Hollywood types that the Time’s Up movement would later seek to expose and dethrone, but who roamed freely in the bellbottomed Los Angeles of the seventies.
Either because I am a mid-twenties valley gal, or because I have an insatiable (and rarely catered to) love of complicated-yet-relatable female characters, the film for me is about Kane. To see a woman in her mid-twenties be at once fierce and uncertain, imperfect and beautiful, sexy and not sexualized? Intoxicating! Don’t get me wrong, Kane wants approval and attention, but she has agency, even in her most unguarded moments.
All of this, from Haim’s crushingly vulnerable eyes as she asks Penn, mid candle-lit monologue, “Wait, are you acting or is this real?” to Cooper’s desperate grumbles as he stumbles down Ventura Blvd at dawn in his soiled white suit–I loved. In fact, these moments were so irresistible that I found myself refusing to accept the parts of the film that did not work. Most notably, the ten-year age gap between Kane and Valentine. I understood its function: Valentine’s age justified his need for a chaperone or a chauffeur (cue Kane), and at 25, Kane was just old enough to fear a failure to launch. However, its poetry wasn’t enough to suspend my disbelief. As a 26-year-old myself, even star-power might not be powerful enough to make me consider swooning for a high school sophomore (no, not even DiCaprio in 1989). But then again, perhaps if I still lived over-the-hill with my parents and three sisters (yes, I too am the youngest of three girls!), I might be singing a different tune.
Ultimately, Paul Thomas Anderson made this film for himself. Packed with characters resembling personalities from his youth and actors with whom he has personal ties (Hoffman is the son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Haim is the daughter of Anderson’s childhood art teacher), Anderson kept his hometown saga close to heart. Like its title, (the name of an old Valley record shop never referenced in the movie) to know, you have to know. And, because I’ve made the pilgrimage from the Galleria to Castle Park and lunched at Rive Gauche with my AP French class, I respect this very Valley choice. It’s clear that the occasionally discombobulated plot-line makes best sense when interwoven with the fabric of Anderson’s memory. For some, this might make it all feel like an absolutely mind-bendingly brilliant student film. One with unbelievable production value, stand-out performances and a script that nearly accomplishes telling the story, but would work best in tandem with a written thesis or a Q&A. For me, though, it hit the spot. I knew it would… or maybe I willed it to.
