Review of Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

I remember when this movie first came out, it was everywhere. At that point in 2021 I was only starting to get interested in film as a medium to study, and had just gotten my first job working as a contributing writer over at MovieWeb.

I would eventually get bumped up to film critic during my time there, but when Licorice Pizza came out, I was only just starting to get my toes wet in the world of filmmaking and what it could mean to me, on a personal level, and my research.

That said, I didn’t watch this movie for years after the fact. I was on a flight to San Diego when I saw that Delta had it as one of their options, and because I had six hours up in the air, I shrugged and told myself why not.

I thought the premise was weird to begin with, and, after watching May December while writing this (which elevates this concept to a whole new level), I still think this.

Let’s get into the review!

A high schooler and 25-year-old slowly get together over the course of the movie.

Set in the early seventies, right outside of Los Angeles, we learn who our protagonists are pretty early on in the movie. We have 15-year-old Gary Valentine, who is in high school and is an actor slowly getting his career together.

When he comes for school picture days, he meets Alana Kane, who’s 25 and the assistant to the photographer.

He falls in love with her immediately, and asks her to come to dinner. She’s a little scandalized by this random high schooler asking her to dinner, but for some reason she does it anyways.

Gary is then offered a gig in New York City, but his mother is unable to go. He needs this opportunity, and he ends up inviting Alana to be his guardian for that trip. In the mean time, she starts dating his co-star, brewing up even more tension between the two. Gary inevitably gets jealous, but Alana breaks up with the guy after he declares himself an atheist at her family’s Shabbat dinner.

He then starts a business selling waterbeds after he finds one in a wig shop and declares it the next best thing on the market. He meets Alana again while at a trade expo geared towards teenage entrepreneurs, but drama happens when he’s arrested in front of her, declared as a murder suspect.

Alana joins him at the police station, the two reunite, and then she joins the business to help sell these beds.

He then introduces her to his talent agent, then gets upset when she says she’s open to appearing nude. She won’t even adhere to his requests to see her boobs, but she then angrily shows them to him later, then slaps him when he asks to touch them.

They then open a storefront for the business, but Alana gets pissed off when Gary starts kissing one of his classmates while in the backroom. The agent then gets Alana a gig, which puts them on a crash course trajectory yet again.

The waterbed manufacturer closes, though, when the oil crisis hits in 1973, and they start to make plans to close the business.

On the last delivery to Jon Peters, Alana and Gary end up screwing the guy over after Gary intentionally leaves the pump on (Peters threatened Gary early on, threatening to strangle his brother), and Alana helps him out in getting away. Alana then gets a job as a staffer for a local politician, and Gary decides to open an arcade.

The two start arguing yet a again about their age, and Alana goes off (rather poorly) on Gary. She offers to drive him home, but he declines. Gary opens the arcade, and Alana eventually goes off to find him when she’s asked to pose as a fake girlfriend for someone.

There, Gary announces her as “Mrs. Alana Valentine,” and the two of them venture off into the night together.

Overall Thoughts

Like I said, I found this movie to be a little bit uncomfortable when it comes to this age gap. '

I think that it really captures the male perspective here, and it even delves a tiny more into fantasy territory when it comes to the boob scene even. I was not expecting certain scenes to happen at all, which made me scratch my head even more in the end.

It’d be a fine movie if they were the same age, or if he were at least legal, to be honest, but I just couldn’t get with this.

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