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Licorice Pizza Movie Review

Licorice Pizza is a 2021 coming-of-age romance film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman. It is a disappointing movie.

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“Soggy bottom sounds like someone shit their pants“

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Alana Kane and Gary Valentine grow up, run around, and fall in love in California’s San Fernando Valley in the 1970s. I am not a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. I find his movies convoluted, boring and ultimately immensely overrated. But for Licorice Pizza I had hopes it would appeal to me as the premise sounded cool and the movie seemed less pretentious than his usual fare. After seeing it now, the movie met my expectations, but only to a degree.

I absolutely loved the first half of this film. The romance between Alana and Gary is wonderful and the two have such a fun, playful dynamic. The movie’s fueled by that sense of energetic, fiery youth and that is easily its biggest strength. The two meeting and having a couple of dates along with their jealousy and on-and-off flirting was the highlight of the picture.

But then the movie crashed hard, which was frustrating to witness. It could have been such a great film, an instant romantic teen classic, but it ended up being an incoherent mess due to the director’s typical decision to introduce many other uninteresting characters and pointless subplots into the proceedings, hurting the already established excellent main relationship.

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I don’t know what Sean Penn was doing here, but whatever he was doing, it did not work. In fact, this character annoyed me how pointless he felt. The same should be said for Bradley Cooper, who is so frustrating here as this producer who is only there to act erratically and throw things around. All of the other actors played even less memorable and unimportant bits and pieces, so there is no point in mentioning any of them.

Cooper Hoffman is apparently Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son. Nepotism issues put aside, he is actually surprisingly good and very believable as Gary and the character is very well written overall. But Alana Haim is a true breakout performer here with great potential. She is so magnetic in the main role that she easily stole the show from everybody else here, plus the whole girl in her twenties dating a minor narrative was fresh and interesting.

Their scenes together are so magnetic, fun and exciting that the rest of the movie felt like an afterthought. The running scenes were very cinematic and the production design, costumes, make-up and great attention to detail in recreating its time period are all worthy of high praise. The soundtrack is also surprisingly strong. There were only a few numbers that did not appeal to me, but for the most part the songs were eclectic and they accompanied their scenes effortlessly well.

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But the script in Licorice Pizza is ultimately its biggest downfall and the fact that the movie is praised in this area the most is mind-boggling to me. The pacing and the structure are atrociously meandering with the entire second half being basically about nothing. And I do not have an issue with movies that are structured this way if the singular bits and pieces hold water individually, but they did not as most were forgettable and even annoying.