We start to believe she might act as a more mature and put-together figure for Gary to look up to, but then she blows a couple of job prospects. As soon as we begin to imagine that Alana is starting to enjoy her role as a seductress figure for Gary to chase after, she asks to be his business partner instead. Not only does she tease our expectations to their very limits, the film itself reflects this poking and prodding act. What interests and excites her? It’s hard to say.Īlana is our key to understanding the winding roadmap that is Licorice Pizza.
What are her ambitions? She doesn’t know, she tells successful 15-year-old actor Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) over dinner at a restaurant called Tail o’ the Cock. A bored, directionless photographer’s assistant, Alana nonchalantly rejects any easy plot-point that might help us get a grasp on her character. But while in his first tribute, Inherent Vice, the inquisitive counter-culture affiliate Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) earnestly engages with his surroundings and follows the threads of societal paranoia all the way to vampiric drug smuggling operations and FBI conspiracies, Licorice Pizza’s protagonist, 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim), refuses to follow any such thread. Licorice Pizza is writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s second ode to Los Angeles in the early 1970s: A city freshly under the oppressive shadow of the Manson Family murders and the tail end of the Vietnam War.
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