Coming-of-age films trade in nostalgia and relatability, so it makes sense that so many are about young men. The male experience is the generic one, the default, and in order to be as affecting as possible the coming-of-age genre is dominated by films like Stand by Me, Dead Poets Society and The Karate Kid. There are coming of age films about women, of course there are, but they have to justify going against the norm – women in films aren’t allowed to just come of age, they have to grapple with what it means to be a girl first.
Mystic Pizza is a classic example of a female driven coming-of-age film that doesn’t quite know what to do with its characters. It follows childhood friends Jojo (Lili Taylor) and sisters Daisy (Julia Roberts) and Kat (Annabeth Gish) from the small town of Mystic as they work in the titular pizza parlour and struggle with their identities and ambitions. It can be hard to know the best vessel to show a young woman’s development and for Mystic Pizza at least, this means that we end up with three love stories.
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The most coherent and straightforward of these storylines belongs to Jojo, and the film begins and ends with her wedding to Billy (Vincent d’Onofrio). It’s not the idea of marriage that frightens Jojo but what it represents: getting married means Jojo won’t leave Mystic, it means that she’ll be expected to have kids, it means that she won’t responsible for only herself. Unlike the others, Jojo and Billy’s relationship predates the beginning of the film, and their comedic back and forth makes it feel grounded and real in a way that makes the other relationships suffer in comparison. The most heart-breaking moment in Mystic Pizza is Jojo realising that ‘If he really loved me, he’d wait. But I guess if I really loved him, I’d marry him.
Jojo’s plotline also does a lot of heavy lifting for the subtle undercurrent of emphasis on female empowerment. Part of what’s so intoxicating about the idea of female led coming-of-age movies is the agency that they grant women over the direction of their own life, and Jojo’s refusal to get married allows her the time to decide what she wants her life to look like. Jojo also talks frankly about her sexual attraction to Billy, normalising the idea that romance isn’t the only thing to consider in a relationship or a marriage. Historically, marriage has been used to restrict women, but in Mystic Pizza, Jojo eventually chooses it for herself, concluding that it can be whatever she wants it to be.
It’s a shame then, that out of all three storylines, Jojo’s gets what feels like the least amount of time dedicated to it. The film wants you to believe that Kat is the main character, but her plotline highlights Mystic Pizza’s biggest failure: its insistence on revolving Kat’s storyline around her affair with her 30-something married employer. Mystic Pizza plays this as romantic, but thirty years later, its mainly just disturbing.
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Kat is the only character with clear direction, with a revered scholarship to Yale, and there are glimmers of a more interesting story in the periphery. Kat’s rivalry with Daisy, fuelled by jealously on both ends, is subtly moving, as is her effort to make enough money to afford college, and by extension, have autonomy over her own future. Either of these would have been a fascinating thread to follow, but instead Mystic Pizza seems to be convinced that no female coming-of-age narrative is complete without some sort of romantic revelation.
Like Jojo, like Kat, Daisy’s main plotline is about a boy. The best thing about Daisy’s love interest Charlie (Adam Storke) is that Matt Damn has a cameo as his gloriously sulky brother. Apart from that he’s mainly just a generic rich boy, especially in contrast to the magnetic Julia Roberts. As Daisy, Roberts is difficult, reckless and completely charming – Daisy is cruel and kind, often within the same scene. Daisy is so many things at once and granted so much agency, that Mystic Pizza almost gets away with pigeonholing another great character and performance into a romantic plotline.
There are some interesting moments where their class difference come to a forefront, and it informs the inherent tension between them. Unlike Charlie, Daisy doesn’t have options, and although her relationship plotline is resolved by a romantic gesture and some sweet words, her future is still up in the air at the end of the film. There’s the unspoken fact that Daisy’s best way out of Mystic is to marry someone like Charlie, and at times it’s unclear if Daisy loves Charlie or what he represents. In a particularly somber moment, she tells the other girls that all she has is her lovely smile and the beer they just stole. Daisy is beautiful, but there’s an awareness that this, her only really asset in life, will eventually fade.
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Your first relationship is a common theme in coming-of-age relationships, but in so many the female romantic interest is only there for the male lead to project their own ideas on to. In Mystic Pizza, Jojo, Daisy, and Kat aren’t perfect, but they’re real. Storylines like Jojo’s and to a lesser extent, Daisy’s, highlight how choosing your romantic partner can be, for a woman, as good as choosing the rest of your life.
On the other hand, by intertwining the coming-of-age theme so tightly with the female main characters romantic developments, their growth is just as much about their ability to be a viable romantic partner as it is about growing into themselves. Mystic Pizza will make an excellent point about female agency in one scene, only to undercut itself in the next, leaving its overall message muddled. Like its characters, Mystic Pizza isn’t flawless but it’s trying it’s best. As the characters are so fond of saying, it is the 80s.
