Licorice Pizza
Year: 2021
Rating: R
Length: 133 minutes / 2.22 hours
Paul Thomas Anderson is an acquired taste. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve completely acquired it yet. I absolutely loved There Will Be Blood (2007), which was my first exposure to this director. I saw The Master (2012) after that and was so confused that I stayed away from Inherent Vice (2014). Maybe the magic came with Daniel Day-Lewis, which is why I gave Phantom Thread (2017) a shot. Still weird. With Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, Licorice Pizza (2021), the odd name prepared me for more weird, which it delivered.
By “weird” I don’t mean something filled with bizarre drug-induced visuals. It’s more like the setting and plot ground it to reality, but the characters act strangely throughout. They’re almost illogical. Luckily, most of these “weird” characters (like the ones portrayed by Sean Penn and Bradley Cooper) are minor distractions from the primary plot of the film. Still, having a child star who is still a minor pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman seven years his senior is weird, and I kept having to do math in my head to figure out when he’d be old enough for any of this to be even close to appropriate.
I’m thinking Paul Thomas Anderson’s appeal is more in the way he conveys the feel of an era. Licorice Pizza seems to nail that mid-1970s aesthetic. Using historic events to bound this story to a specific timeframe is a great technique, especially when it affects the characters in a way that requires them to change. For example, the gas crisis leads to perhaps one of the best and most intense driving sequences I’ve seen since The Wages of Fear (1953). However, such singular set pieces aren’t enough for me to get past the weird moments in this movie.
Well-grounded in the 1970s, but filled with weird characters, I give Licorice Pizza 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
