Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021 #3, 2021 Skandies
I was looking forward to this one based entirely on the title. I got into music in sixth grade, and I spent much of 1983–1984 snapping up 45s at the local record stores. When I could get my mom to drive all the way out to Brea, I’d go to Tower Records, but there were three record stores on Tustin Avenue in Orange, right near my elementary school, that we went to a lot more often. One was called Music Plus; another was the Wherehouse; and the third was Licorice Pizza. So I was envisioning a trip back to the early ’80s and an ensemble comedic drama about employees at a Southern California record store.
But no! The movie has nothing to do with Licorice Pizza the record store—it isn’t even a “My Dirty Shoes” type of situation in which the title is drawn from an incidental detail. The record store never appears. The movie turns out to be about a Danny Bonaduce-lookin’ child actor in the early ’70s, about to age out of the profession at fifteen, who tries his hand at any number of small-time hustles: selling waterbeds immediately after waterbeds are invented, opening a pinball arcade immediately after pinball is legalized. Helping him with his schemes is a young woman, ten years his senior, who falls into his orbit after he hits on her at school picture day at his high school (she works for the photo agency). The movie is episodic, one story after another without much connective tissue: at one point the female lead falls in with a bunch of G.I.‑Gen Hollywood types, and at another she becomes a key volunteer for Joel Wachs’s first run for mayor of Los Angeles. I have read that the genesis of the film was that one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s friends, who went on to become a movie producer, was full of wild stories about his youth, and Anderson just strung a bunch of them together. And that’s how the movie feels: its trajectory is like one of one of the pinballs at the male lead’s arcade, bouncing from one thing to the next. It was watchable enough, and I did like the way that the stories are shaped by historical events: for instance, a long stretch of the movie revolves around the fact that the 1973 oil crisis had made gasoline extremely difficult to obtain. So that was pretty cool. But I didn’t like either of the main characters, and that was enough of a sticking point that this is going to fall into the “mixed but leaning backward” category for me.
As for why it’s called Licorice Pizza: apparently Anderson has said that he wanted a title that would evoke his nostalgia for his Southern California childhood, and those two words did the trick. Those who, unlike PTA and me, did not have a Southern California childhood in the late twentieth century must have been mystified by the title. But maybe that’s better than feeling like you’ve fallen for a bait and switch.
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