Licorice Pizza (2021) is a highlight reel of PTA films—but I don’t mean that as a compliment

Neither as intricate as Magnolia, as curiously macabre as Phantom Thread, nor as charming as Boogie Nights, this “best of” reel is overexposed

(Spoilers hereafter)

For ardent cinemagoers in the UK, the following words of acclaim are a common sight at the moment: “All of [his] best films in a single package.”

Now, the quote in question actually refers to Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, originating in Little White Lies’s first-look review and now appearing in the film’s trailer, but I think the same could almost be said of Licorice Pizza with regards to director Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA). The trouble is, here it isn’t quite the compliment it seems.

Looking back over his roster of hits, it’s easy to see where most of them make their cameo appearances in Licorice Pizza: there’s the array of self-important misfits from Magnolia and Boogie Nights, the latter of which shares also the 70s setting and vibe; its central romance is at times fresh and puerile, as in Punch-Drunk Love, and at others toxic, as in Phantom Thread; it is every bit as meandering as Inherent Vice (another 70s setting); and there are moments that mirror that sense of dangerous propinquity between protagonist and unpredictable authority figures which is so central to The Master. (I couldn’t really find any connection with There Will Be Blood that wasn’t heavily reaching, so that one’s predictably a miss.)

What brings the film down from its ambitious (or at least ambitiously noncommittal) heights, however, is that very range of ideas. When so many of them are in play, each is left insufficiently developed—little more than a façade, a pale imitation of better works. Nowhere is this more clear than in the half-formed romance between teenaged Gary Valentine and 25-year-old Alana Kane. This romance is something really key to the story—they’re ten years apart in age, for god’s sake, we want to know about its intricacies, its shortcomings, its ethicality. But PTA rarely deigns to show us any of it besides petty arguments.

Some people have found the age gap repugnant; for me the problem isn’t whether or not it’s unethical, it’s that the age gap is just hanging there limply, a narrative damp squib. “Okay,” some might say, “Maybe that’s the point—it’s the liberal 70s where people went a bit too crazy. The age gap isn’t important, it’s just there because this is just an objective film about how things were.” But then why does the film go out of its way to establish how immature Alana is and how mature Gary is, as if this makes them perfect peas in a pod? (He isn’t emotionally mature, by the way; owning his own business doesn’t change that he is basically a stroppy little child throughout.) It’s like PTA is trying to establish the premise of why these characters would work together without ever following through on his argument. They have no chemistry, even platonically. They never learn from each other; they seem to fly right past, never so much as meeting in the middle. The romance ends up feeling neither spontaneous, idealistic, nor even cutely naïve; it just feels jejune.

Elsewhere is commitment a big problem for the film. There’s an episode in which Gary and Alana deliver a waterbed to self-proclaimed “big name” Jon Peters. When they are late, and Peters derides and threatens Gary, they flood his house and flee into the night—only to run into Peters later on when his car has broken down, and he demands that they drive him back to his house to pick up a can of petrol. The trouble is that the film by that point had shown itself to be so noncommittal that I knew nothing would come of this episode. I know I wasn’t meant to feel a genuine sense of threat, but nor I was even entertained. I looked on, bored and waiting for the segment to end, so that the film could return itself to the frightfully underdeveloped romance it was asking me to believe in.

Another example: sexual harassment targeted at Alana, comments on Alana’s looks (particularly in regards to her race), and her involvement in a “beard” scheme for political candidate Joel Wachs seem to suggest a commentary on the female experience in Hollywood. If so, this idea never fully realises itself. After all, Gary’s role in such a story, with all his conniving, his pressuring, his entitlement, couldn’t possible be one of a hero to root for. Gary, just by virtue of not being Jack Holden or Jon Peters, isn’t a good guy. If the “female experience” was an angle the film was going for, it seems to be rather undone by the rather milquetoast ending that seems to play out as the conclusion to a straight-faced romance plot between Alana and the total asshole she inexplicably seems to be in love with.

By including so many elements and never realising them, the film misses out on what has previously made Paul Thomas Anderson so good in the writer’s chair: that his stories, while they may span decades, while they may have multiple protagonists who never even meet, while they may be about the most petty people imaginable, are fixed by a binding glue that makes itself evident before the end of the film. In Magnolia, it’s the revelation that one has countless, unknowable relationships with people one has never even met. In Phantom Thread, it’s projection: our innate, culturally-programmed desire as members of the audience to see on-screen relationships work, no matter the cost. In Boogie Nights, it’s Marky Mark’s phallus.

Licorice Pizza, by contrast, feels literally like a highlight reel: a collective of fun moments out of context, where you can’t properly engage with them or appreciate them. There’s something of a guerrilla element to it—no sense of planning or foresight, no discernible pattern nor reason, except perhaps to fit the story around a few historical events. Yet even to use this term, guerrilla, is to imply an efficacy that simply is not present in the film. To return to that Little White Lies quote, this film may contain something from all of PTA’s best films, it doesn’t contain the best parts of his best films—precisely because the best parts are those which encompass his entire narratives, something for which the film has a notable disregard.

So why so much praise, you might ask. It’s always great to be a bystander when a film like Licorice Pizza comes out. Inevitably, there’s an argument between various magazines and newspapers and social media users about whether the film was pointless, whether those who thought it was pointless missed the point . . . Everyone talks past one another. But I think it’s unfair to say the film is purposeless, intentionally or unintentionally so. The film quite clear in its purpose. It is a The Ground Beneath Her Feet-type story (a great novel and much better approach to this kind of romance, by the way) about two people who love and break up, and love and break up . . . The ending, that admittedly great shot of the two running together “across time” as it were, concretely proves this as its aim. Why, then, claim that this is a film with no point? It had a point; it just articulated it poorly because it was too busy trying to do other things.

I have no wish to take away from other people’s enjoyment of the film. I myself did enjoy the film sporadically. But while I understand that the appeal for this film is less the characters and more the “vibe”—that 70s LA feel, the style, the lifestyle, the bars and restaurants, the pinball—I found it disappointing that the film did little else, despite the evidence that it meant to. A few choice historical events are featured (most notably the 1973 oil embargo andthe lifting of the pinball ban) which helps to pedal the plot along, but they don’t really sell a narrative. Narrative is about character, and it’s character that contrasts Licorice Pizza against PTA’s better works. In Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, even The Master, all their kooky characters form a perfect mosaic of headcases, meshing together and filling in the slots between one another so that we understand each of them perfectly. By contrast, Licorice Pizza’s oddities are an archipelago, disconnected and forgotten as soon as one departs for the next.