On a plot level, there’s little that happens in Palo Alto that looks like my teenage
years. And yet, in its evocation of adolescent confusion and uncertainty, it
feels achingly true. There’s something about being a teenager that’s incredibly
isolating. While you’re living through it, you might think your particular
combination of problems are completely your own, that no one could possibly
relate. Awkwardness, loneliness, and introspection are closed systems. But then
somewhere along the way, as you find getting older leads to perspective, if you
let it, a switch is flipped. Suddenly you can see the teenage experience for
what it is. Surface details of teen lives differ wildly, but the feelings
underneath are universal. The best movies about teens understand this.
The teens in Palo Alto
don’t have the perspective about themselves and about the world that would
bring their problems into focus. They care too little and too much in the same
instant. In the liminal middle of their teenage years, choppy emotional waters
rage underneath protective layers of disaffected monotone. It’s written and
directed by Gia Coppola, a third-generation director, granddaughter of Francis
Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola. She confidently captures an adolescent
state of mind with the specificity and sympathy of someone far enough removed
to have perspective, but not too far removed to still feel its immediacy. She’s
27 and has a photographer’s eye. The world of the suburban high-schoolers she
explores is lived in, captured in details casual and right. It’s not
art-directed stylist-driven product-placement “teenage.” It is languorously
shot by Autumn Durald, hazily lived in, scuffed-up, stretched, with details
that don’t fall off on the sides of the frames.
The film follows four teens through a short period of time
in their lives as they drift with anxiety, apathy, and uncertainty. April (Emma
Roberts) is shy and sensitive, sweet but often ignored. She finds herself drawn
towards and intimidated by male attention, but usually too busy with schoolwork
and babysitting to act on it. Teddy (Jack Kilmer, son of Val Kilmer and Joanne
Whalley, in his debut role) is nice, artistic, and curious, but troubled. He
hangs with bad influences and finds himself in trouble with the law. Fred (Nat
Wolff) is twitchy and unpredictable. He seems to be play acting “bad kid,” with
a quick temper, teasing danger, and affected odd behaviors that make it hard to
tell whether he’s only fooling or genuinely disturbed. Emily (Zoe Levin) flirts
and fools around with lots of boys. But though she’s willing, her interior life
is more conflicted. At one point she hollowly grumbles, “I’ve never been in
love.”
They float in similar social circles, their paths crossing
from time to time. But even together they seem so lonely, all in the process of
figuring out who they are, what they like, and who they will become. They never
quite figure it out in the time we spend with them. The film ends before any
resolution of that kind. But that’d be too simple anyway. It’s not a film with
a big statement about Kids These Days or the State of the American Teenager.
It’s not moralizing or message-based. It’s a movie of small gestures and modest
shifts within the prickly fog of adolescence. Coppola summons the ambiguity of high
school days. These characters are stretching away from the children they so
recently were, reaching towards the adults they’ll become. This stretched state
is dangerous business.
They’re brooding and troubled, trying on personas, nervous
and self-conscious, shyly testing one another. They provoke and are provoked,
experimenting with alcohol, drugs, sex, art, music, relationships. The film
doesn’t let them off easy while showing a great deal of compassion for them. They’re
often photographed alone or in pairs, chatting in cars, sitting in bedrooms,
loitering in parking lots and driveways. Most revealing is when they are alone.
One kid writes a song on a guitar. Another puts on a dress and tests out flirty
poses. They’re free to try the boundaries of their identity most fully when
alone. Get them together and the experiments dissect, altering in response to
the others.
Adults, and role models in general, are rare. They drop in
for platitudes before carrying on with their own preoccupations. There are benign
parents, teachers, and judges upholding the line between children and adults.
Then there are adults creepily muddling that line. For example, there’s a
soccer coach (James Franco, who also wrote the short stories on which the film
is based) who stares sleepily, seductively across the line. He’s only a decade
or so older than his students, but the developmental importance of those years
is painfully obvious. The glimpses of adult life we see on the margins of the
teens’ stories are ghosts of future possibilities.
Coppola is content with making Palo Alto a hazy mood piece, getting a contact high off of the
characters and their interior struggles acted outwards. She gets relaxed
controlled performances out of her young cast. They act like real kids, and the
movie watches what they do, how they act, and how it affects them. It hangs
back observing, capturing moments in time that are critically important and
yet, if they survive, doomed to fade in importance with astonishing speed as
they have the rest of their lives ahead of them. When the movie ends, the
characters are unresolved, open-ended. They have long ways to go. Some of them
are more fully down bad paths with no easy way out. Others have started to
hesitantly, incrementally move forward in better directions. This film has the
compassion to respect their lived experience and evoke it with care.
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