Review: ‘Licorice Pizza’ Is Funny And Charming But Ultimately Undone By An Undercooked Narrative

It’s hard not to look back at earlier moments in one’s life with that sort of whimsical, ethereal nostalgia that colors the past in rose colored glasses. The carefree outlook of youth combined with the later yearning for it against the pressures and ravages of time easily congeal into palpable haze that often give our memory a dreamlike quality that pervades our recollections of days gone by. The new Paul Thomas Anderson film Licorice Pizza feels precisely like a nostalgic memory of an earlier time, and it’s a charming, funny, but an ultimately dissonant story.

The film centers on Alana Kane (newcomer Alana Haim) and Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) in the San Fernando Valley of the early 1970s. The former, a relevantly older young woman, meets the latter (a burgeoning child star) at his high school, and he falls smitten. The troubling element is that the former is relevantly older, so the intimately tied pair rotate around a set of complex circumstances that drives the story through a set of largely engaging stories.

The writing as a whole is funny, and a lot of the humor lands while some of the individual scenes are my favorites of the year (particularly one with a truck and a hill). There are a number of hilarious situations and the dialogue remains tight throughout. The main actors, Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, are electric and share loads of chemistry. Alana plays her character with a reserved but passionate and sometimes tactical aplomb. She doesn’t know what she wants, and she loathes any suggestion that Gary Valentine draws her attention—but he continues to. And Gary and his endless machinations pull Alana in, and the pair seemingly attempt move on… but never truly do. It’s a warm but complex tapestry of relationships permeating the events that populate the script.

For what is essentially a comedy, however, Licorice Pizza is 30-40 minutes longer than the story needs needs to be, and you feel it. Entire sections of the film feel out of sync with each other, like a set of three very different films forcibly duct-taped together instead of a singular film with a solid narrative through-line. The biggest issue is that these segments don’t organically conclude and build to a larger, grand ending as much as they interrupt and negate each other… Alana and Gary are spending time together with an engaging, odd chemistry until they suddenly just aren’t. Alana tries to make it as an actress until she just sort of doesn’t and moves onto something else. It’s a script where instead of an organic chain of cause and effect, events just happen and get abandoned rather than resolved or incorporated towards the whole.

All this is further complicated by the fact that the characters are both fairly shallow, not just in their character but in the complexity with which they are written. The youthful Gary Valentine flits between choices, too, but we don’t get a greater window into his psyche other than his propensity to instantly move on from anything that troubles him. Meanwhile, Alana’s erratic choices fail to make sense because we don’t get much of a real window into her inner life to any meaningful degree. They’re strong, charismatic performances of characters that don’t have a lot going beneath the surface, and it contributes to the overall feeling that everything that happens is fun to watch but ultimately fails to matter.

At its core, Licorice Pizza is and feels like merely a long collection of scenes that fail to congeal into a solid, unitary work of art. It feels like stream-of-consciousness storytelling, with events happening just because and shifting abruptly just because, etc., wash, rinse, repeat. It captures the magical whimsy of youth well, and many of the individual scenes land, but the film as a whole is too long, too structurally erratic, and too shallow in its character development to really work. All the performances are great and it is a charming, largely-fun-but-forgettable cinematic experience that gradually wears out its welcome over a long runtime.

Licorice Pizza hits theaters November 26th.