L IFESTYLE /C ULTURE
Youth is Wasted on the Young in ‘Licorice Pizza’
ARTS SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
THE COMING-OF-AGE
genre is a chameleon — a
vessel easily adaptable to a
host of diff erent backdrops and
climates — and Paul Th omas
Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” is
the lizard languishing in the
summer of the San Fernando
Valley in California in 1973.

Th ose asked to come of age
are Gary Valentine (Cooper
Hoff man, son of the late
Philip Seymour Hoffman),
a big-boned 15-year-old
kid-actor quickly running out
of roles to play, and Alana Kane
(Alana Haim), an easy-breezy
LEGAL DIRECTORY
25-year-old with a level head
weighing her prospects and
biding her time as a photogra-
pher’s assistant.

And, like a chameleon,
“Licorice Pizza” is a visual
spectacle, shot on 35 mm fi lm
that captures the dreaminess of
the early ’70s but with awkward
physicalities — some racist and
sexist tropes that were better
left in the ’70s — that limit
its majesty.

Gary, the smooth-talking
hustler, is followed around by
an entourage of latchkey-kid
Lost Boys, his minions in
his business ventures — fi rst
a waterbed company, then a
pinball arcade. He’s their Peter
Pan, the boy who never grows
Alana Haim (left) and Cooper Hoff man in “Licorice Pizza,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent fi lm
up, but he acts the role of the
de facto adult (the last role
Gary seems well-equipped
to play, having grown out
of the ones available to him
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14 by his middle-aged talent
agent friends).

Gary’s reality as a teenager
betrays his desire to act as
the adult: He’s pimply and
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JEWISH EXPONENT
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Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon
red-faced and tucks the tail of
his shirt into his pants with
clammy hands. He goes to
bars and knows the patrons
on a fi rst-name basis, but
he sits and orders rounds of
only Coca-Cola.

But his latest and greatest
attempt to grow up, thwarted
by his teenage susceptibilities,
is his infatuation with Alana,
whom he meets when she taps
her toes and holds the mirror
Gary uses to fi x his straw-
berry hair — a little greasy, but
combed over meticulously —
before he takes his high school
yearbook picture.

Although Haim tackles her
debut acting role with impres-
sive ease and complexity, Alana
Kane the character (and Haim
by default) spends the fi lm let
down by her counterparts.

As a photographer’s assis-
tant, she’s slapped on the
tuchus by a photographer but
brushes it off with a roll of
her eyes.

When she takes former
child actor Lance home for
Shabbat dinner with her family
(the real-life Haim family),
she fi nds out that the boy she
believed was Jewish actually
identifi es as an atheist. He
refuses to do the Motzi over
the challah, saying that if
God existed, he wouldn’t have
permitted the suff ering in the
Vietnam War.

See Licorice, Page 20
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