Licorice Pizza
boy what a fucking mess (warning:
@IdleRich style long rant incoming)
essentially Paul Thomas Anderson making a Wes Anderson movie, with all the cloying whimsy and deeply uncomfortable use of people of color - who are basically absent, but when they do briefly appear are, in true Wes Anderson fashion, comic relief and/or tools to move forward the emotional journey of the white protagonists - that that implies, but set in PTA's favored shaggy 70s nostalgia, somewhere between the Robert Altmanisms of
Boogie Nights and the stoned magical realism of
Inherent Vice. only even Wes Anderson had the bare sense to not have his teenage protagonist in
Rushmore actually get together with Olivia Williams at the end and present it as a sweetly triumphant love story.
yes, that is correct. this is a film about the love story between a 15-year old boy and a mid-20s Alana Haim, which ends with them overcoming various obstacles to get together in a way the audience is meant to uncritically applaud, with absolutely no kind of ironic distancing or other commentary to say that hey, maybe this is uncool. She spends the whole movie being pursued by and flirting with this precocious boy, which is totally valid - she tells him it's never happening, is a bad idea, questions their relationship, etc - some of it is uncomfortable, but seemingly meant to be, so OK. but then the climax is pure unadulterated romcom fantasy: they fight, realize they're meant to be together, rush to find each in full cliche "what are you waiting for? go after her/him!" style, kiss and head off into romantic bliss together.
except he's 15 and she is, as mentioned, an adult. Alana even has a conversation with one of her sisters - undoubtedly the best parts of the film are the entire Haim family, parents included, playing essentially themselves - in which she's like "is it weird that I'm an adult and I spend all my time hanging out with this teenager and his friends" and her sister is basically "nah dawg it's only weird if you think it's weird". obv the existence of patriarchy complicates any direct gender double standard but still can you imagine this conversation between two men in their mid-late 20s about a 15-year old girl? like, what the fuck are we doing here?
there's also an uncomfortable running gag where John Michael Higgins - a very white dude - speaks English in a cartoonishly mock Asian accent to his succession of Japanese wives. it's at least complicated by the clear implication that he is, even by the standards of the early 70s, a clueless/exploitative jerk, but his wives are essentially mute props to provide a laugh and move the teenage boy's story forward. They speak unsubtitled Japanese - quite a lazy way to suggest the difficulty of communication in a more general sense which you'd think PTA is above, but no - and so are essentially mute ciphers, like the silent Harajuku girls Gwen Stefani hauled around 20 years ago.
PTA is of course a master filmmaker, so everything is executed at an extremely high level, technical precision, etc, and the acting is generally very good, including Alana Haim. but again, what the fuck are we
doing here? I'm the last person who wants to say uncomfortable or taboo material shouldn't be presented, but if you're going to present this adult/teen love story you can't just do it uncritically. Todd Solondz's
Happiness for example, is a vastly more uncomfortable and disturbing film about pedophilia, but it's also a clear-eyed (and brave) attempt to critically engage with an extremely difficult topic. Whereas
Licorice Pizza is a bildungsroman sweet love story about an adult banging a teenager, smothered in all that cloying Wes Anderson style bathos.
anyway yeah, fuck this movie