Licorice Pizza

I just got back from a trip to a cavernous theater in which I and one other person watched a matinee of Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest movie. It’s a lovely film with lovely performances from Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman. It’s a comic and melancholy appreciation of youth, in all its confidence and confusion. It’s beautifully made, but rather slight—compared to Anderson’s other films. It’s a so-called “hangout” movie—which is a term I see people using to mean a lightweight but charming and romantic story with loose plotting and fun performances that delivers a good time.

In other words, it’s pretty far from The Phantom Thread. Which is fine, unless one wants to be challenged by Anderson, instead of simply charmed and entertained. I think he deserves to make a movie like this and, of course, he does it with masterful craft—also, first-time actors are never this good without a seasoned and brilliant actor’s director.

The challenge for some viewers this time around had to do with some of the politically incorrect aspects of the film, which is set in the 1970s. Now that I’ve seen it myself, my eyes are rolling super hard about the accusation of racism on the part of the director. The only thing really funny about the scenes in question—and a racist character’s fake Asian accent—is the comic strangeness of what the character is doing. (He speaks to his Japanese wives in bad fake Japanese-accented English as if that will help them understand him better—though he speaks no Japanese and the women speak no English.) We are invited, at worst, to laugh at this strangeness, not at the racism itself.

No, the film doesn’t explicitly call out that behavior as racist. It also doesn’t call out the pervasive lechery of many older (in some cases, much older) men in the film, from her photographer boss who smacks her ass, to Bradley Cooper’s Jon Peters getting too much in her personal space, and other examples. And it doesn’t call out Alana for her own “lechery.”

After all, another challenge for some viewers is the fact that Alana is 25 years old while Gary (Hoffman) is fifteen. They are friends, but there’s more feeling than that on both their parts—and some fleeting nominally inappropriate behavior (she shows him—though not us—her breasts at one point, then slaps him when he asks if he can touch and much later they kiss and acknowledge their feelings, but it doesn’t go further in the film). This (obviously reasonably realistic) depiction has caused some handwringing because of its taboo nature; that the characters are equally mature, in spite of their ages, and have a genuine friendship and emotional connection, in addition to a youthful attraction, doesn’t mean as much as the numbers. Many have pointed out that, if the genders were reversed, the film would be unacceptable by today’s standards. (That it might have mattered much less in the actual time period of the story also doesn’t matter.)

This is how we have to watch everything now, with a sharp eye looking out for all the problematics. It’s boring, it’s hypocritical and it’s false. Life is sometimes problematic. Deal with it.