In a sense, it's an appropriate antidote to Phantom Thread. That film was a complex, mature deconstruction of adult relationships, validating the innate and conditioned hindrances of personality that are perseverated by age and experience, pitting our progressively-growing, tragically-irreversible individualism against the incongruous need for dynamic partnership. Anderson's latest is, by contrast, planted within the innocence of youth (and yes, Alana Haim, despite her age, absolutely fits within the same immature developmental stage as Cooper Hoffman- though this is not an insult!). Both films involve characters playing 'games' with one another, but Alana and Gary's games are juvenile, simple, and pure; yet they speak to a similarly enigmatic and indiscernible energy born from that subconscious itch one has when they feel romantic feelings towards a friend, walking an emotional tightrope of vulnerability with irregular behavior shifts, and cannot figure out how to realise a clear path from these feelings they are not prepared to fully indulge. While Phantom Thread's climax offered a tangible yet intricately conceived solution, this film's denouement empowers simplicity as a possible answer to these confounding states.
That's not to say that the content is all candidly surface-level, and Anderson certainly doesn't attempt to undermine the youths' struggle with a didacticism for shedding egos to receive the rewards of love through effortlessness, but that's where the director's empathy towards youth hits just the right note: Alana and Cooper are not "immature" in a pejorative light, but their naïvete is a gift. Their virginal exposures to these passions are portrayed as supremely valuable, and polarized opposites to the 'adults' in the film- who in one way or another embody stagnant, inhibited, and desensitized states of being, approaching social relationships through narcissistic, detached behavioral responses, stuck in their own personalities like Reynolds Woodcock. So it's appropriate that this narrative is an organically-flowing series of mini-adventures where Alana and Gary greet life with gusto, liberated via movement in disparity with the adults' staticity. Sometimes this movement looks like literally running through their physical environments (as seen copiously in the trailer), sometimes it's elastically shifting from actualizing one impetuous idea after the other, or moving from vignette to vignette- occasionally encountering 'adults' transiently emerging and disappearing from the vicinity. Yet the movement is always escorted by profound perceptiveness, fearless immersion, and existential capitalization of each and every impulse with uninhibited activity, even if they don't know how to organize these skills with identities not yet fully formed. It's a necessarily messy trajectory of narrative to emulate that messy experience of growing up.
Her choice to be with Gary is not about Gary being the guy who will save her from this cynical, inevitable (or not- has Anderson reversed his previous film's deterministic thesis of inherent compromise- or perhaps he simply doesn't care enough because in a vacuum 'now' is all that matters?) fate of adulthood's narcissistic traps; instead, her choice is driven by the discovery that she has been limiting herself from accessing just a little bit more of her heart, of being just a little bit more vulnerable and making the moment count with the guy she loves. Her tunnel vision has widened to accept and become empowered by the revelation that she doesn’t have to resign herself to the closed mentality and lifestyle she had prescribed for herself- the caves the adults around her have descended into mechanically with faux-glamour.