Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar Nominated (Best Picture) film opens this Friday at the Playhouse.
The story of Alana Kane and Gary Valentine growing up, running around and going through the treacherous navigation of first love in the San Fernando Valley, 1973.
Advance tickets are on sale now for Licorice Pizza Here!
"There’s no narrative arc to Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson’s beautiful memory of San Fernando Valley in 1973. Instead there’s a satisfying narrative drift, which is much harder to pull off. There’s a seductive ease to Anderson’s filmmaking that makes the film seem pleasantly minor by comparison to the big swings of Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and The Master. Yet the evocative specifics that create such a dreamy atmosphere—the music, the decor and hang-out spots, the anecdotal pieces of storytelling—belie the difficult work of engaging audiences with characters who are not moving forward, but zigzagging at best. Licorice Pizza may be classified as a coming-of-age story, but the term suggests an evolution that doesn’t interest Andersons here. Uncertainty and stasis are the film’s prevailing conditions, and his task is more about defining them than resolving them.
"An important moment comes in first few minutes, when 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim), working as an assistant for a school picture outfit, gets slapped on the behind by a photographer. She’s repulsed by the gesture, but this is 1973, so she understands there are no repercussions for sexual harassment—it just happens in the flow of the day, so common an occurrence that it doesn’t pause the tracking shot that follows her across the gymnasium. Still, it gets to her, and suddenly the fact that she’d been asked on a date by a 15-year-old, Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), seems relatively harmless, a relationship that she at least has the power to control. (Or so she thinks.) Given the general contours of her life—a terrible job, no career prospects, still living at home under her father and sisters’ prying eyes—it’s little wonder that she takes the charming young man up on his offer. It’s not like it will ever go anywhere.
"The Valley is the main character in Licorice Pizza, which makes it analogous to the hangout vibes of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…. in Hollywood, an opportunity for a great California filmmaker to go time-traveling to an era that excites him. There’s not even any era-defining cultural signposts like the Manson murders, and the stars shine no brighter than Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), whose career as a film producer hadn’t even started yet. (The one firm connection between the two films: Peters learned how to cut hair from a protégé of Jay Sebring, the celebrity hairstylist who was murdered along with Sharon Tate and who’s played in Tarantino’s film by Emile Hirsch.) The oil embargo figures in in a fascinating way, but otherwise, Anderson conceives of the ‘70s Valley as a more laid-back and passive milieu, with a future as up-for-grabs as his characters’ destinies.
"In this hazy, golden sandbox, young Gary is king—or at least he has the confidence to assume the throne. He’s a prolific child actor, though there’s plenty of evidence that his moment may be coming to an end. Still, Gary has a showman’s flair that breaks down Alana’s defenses enough to where she grudgingly enjoys being around him, even if she’s teasing him most of the time. His precociousness extends to a talent for entrepreneurship, so when he jumps on the waterbed craze sweeping the country, Gary brings Alana on board as a saleswoman and delivery person. It’s not the last company he launches, either, but Alana naturally eyes better opportunities for herself, like a career in acting or volunteer work on a mayoral campaign. She’s 25. She can’t be doing odd jobs for this twerp forever.
"The episodic style of Licorice Pizza allows room for surprising and delightful drive-by appearances from recognizable faces, like Cooper’s amped-up, belligerent Peters, Sean Penn as an aging star who’s clearly inspired by William Holden, and and Benny Safdie as an idealistic candidate with a potentially fatal flaw in his campaign. Much like another fine ‘70s nostalgia piece, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, the pleasing texture of Licorice Pizza masks the emotional turbulence under the surface. Anderson and Haim, with her sharp-elbowed and funny yet soulful performance, capture the flailing, directionless condition of being a woman in her mid-20s, which is bad in any period, but bad in many other ways connected to time and place. Her inexplicable relationship with a teenage boy—and let’s please be clear about the very mild boundaries of this relationship—becomes, in this context, quite explicable."
- Critic Scott Tobias, The Reveal
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