'Licorice Pizza' Movie's Concerning Age Gap Blasted as 25-Year-Old Dates 15-Year-Old

By Michael Hein

As reviews for Licorice Pizza continue to trickle in, more critics are questioning the movie's central romance. Licorice Pizza follows the love story of Alana Kane (Alana Haim) and Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), who are 25 and 15 years old respectively at the beginning of the film. Many viewers feel that the movie is not critical enough of this concerning age gap.

Paul Thomas Anderson's newest film Licorice Pizza is set in 1973 and begins with a 15-year-old high school boy asking out the 25-year-old woman working as an assistant photographer at his school picture day. The movie is a comedy-drama and a coming-of-age story, with both the main characters evolving through their relationship with each other. It rarely makes note of their age difference – at least, not in the way that some viewers would like. The subjects of legality, morality and statutory rape do not come up.

Some viewers think the movie is missing something critical here. They want a story about this kind of relationship to at least address the room for exploitation between two people of such vastly different ages. Some critics are even complaining that this represents a double-standard, and that a movie about an older man and a younger woman would not be accepted.

Of course, the film has its defenders as well, including many critics who think that the age gap is addressed just perfectly. Here's a look at how the commentary has been going on social media.

Marketing

Many people criticized the marketing of Licorice Pizza, saying it intentionally obscured the age difference between the characters.

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Only One Not Laughing

Some people were caught off guard by the storyline, especially when no one else in the theater had the same reaction as them.

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'Artsy'

Viewers assumed that there was some unspoken artistic message in Licorice Pizza that was supposed to explain or provide commentary on the age gap between the characters. If that was the case, they felt it had failed.

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Success

Others got the exact opposite impression – that the age gap was central to the story and that all the commentary on it was self-evidence.

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Romanticizing

Still, regardless of the filmmaker's intentions, some critics feared that this movie would only serve to romanticize vast age differences in relationships, justifying real-life manipulation somewhere down the line.

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Double Standard

Arguments broke out in the comments to defenders of this film as people accused them of enforcing a double standard. They felt certain that the discourse would look completely different if the characters' genders were swapped.

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Real Life Example

Critics posted photos of real-life 25-year-old women beside real-life 15-year-old boys to drive home the strangeness of this plot. They thought that if the actors had been cast in their real ages, the romance would have been played more honestly.

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