There are too many interesting things about “Palo Alto” to write it off completely, but not enough coherence or real substance to ever really fall in love with it.
To start off, the performances are pretty great. I’m used to seeing Emma Roberts as the gloriously bitchy characters of Ryan Murphy’s shows (“American Horror Story” and “Scream Queens”), but it turns out Roberts is surprisingly good at playing the shy introvert. As her character, April, awkwardly says goodbye to her love interest Teddy (Jack Kilmer) and says she’ll call him, she follows up the promise with a funny expression of self-loathing and embarrassment that instantly makes her endearing. Nat Wolff, in the supporting role of Fred, is given way more emotions to play than his bland soft-spoken protagonist in “Paper Towns.” Both as a figure of hilariously obnoxious comic relief and as one of the film’s antagonists, Wolff is a standout.
Coppola has clearly inherited the directorial prowess of her famous filmmaking family; the whole movie is shot so well, especially with Autumn Durald’s cinematography. With the help of Devonté Hynes’s strong score, Coppola imbues every scene with feeling. The movie is great at crafting images and creating a feeling in the viewer. There are some scenes towards the end, especially an encounter between Fred and a drug dealer, that are surprisingly tense, and there are several sex scenes that are disturbing to watch. When April loses her virginity to Mr. B (James Franco), her soccer coach, the scene is shot evocatively, with surreal close-ups of April’s face repeatedly being swept over with black. It’s one of the most horrifying sex scenes I’ve seen in recent memory.
As great as Coppola is at conveying desperation, horror, and shame, I couldn’t help but get the suspicion that all this great camerawork was covering up a lack of substance. Now, I’m a believer that just because a feeling is achieved through aesthetics doesn’t mean it isn’t genuine—there are plenty of stories with average screenplays that enter the cinematic canon because of their directorial work—so the knowledge that the visual and auditory elements of the film were covering up some spotty writing didn’t make the emotional impact feel illusory to me. That said, it did make it easy for my mind to drift away from the narrative now and then.
The main reason for that, I think, is that there isn’t really a central narrative. The movie is ostensibly about the relationship between April and Mr. B, and there’s certainly a great movie buried somewhere in there about a deeply problematic teacher-student relationship. But surprisingly few scenes are devoted to this central plot because the movie makes the mistake of toggling constantly between April’s narrative, Teddy’s narrative, Fred’s, and supporting character Emily’s (Zoe Levin). Right when I became really wrapped up in the creepy April-Mr. B dynamic, the movie backed off April and returned to Teddy. Teddy’s story is the most unimaginative—he has to do community service after drunkenly getting into a car accident, but he mostly just sulks around, smokes weed, and navel-gazes—but I still got into his story after watching him for a few consecutive scenes…and then, right when I became interested, the movie skipped over to Fred and Emily. All of these stories have such strong potential, especially because Fred and Emily have a horrifying history; at some unspecified party, Fred undressed her and guided groups of guys into the room to, effectively, rape her. But skipping around meant I never had the chance to really focus on any story and become invested. And since each got equal screen time, they were all a bit shallower than they could’ve been. “Palo Alto” is adapted from James Franco’s book of short stories, so maybe this explains it—Coppola probably should’ve focused either on April or Emily exclusively as protagonists, but she tries to cram too much into one movie.
In fact, the movie has to keep creating party sequences to find excuses for all the main characters to be in the same place at the same time. Maybe this would’ve been more effective if Coppola had focused exclusively on one night, like “Dazed and Confused,” but instead it seems like each party scene is designed to finally bring the disparate narratives together. In those scenes, the movies floats the inevitable idea of a romantic relationship between April and Teddy; he’s clearly supposed to be the ‘right guy’ who she ends up with once she realizes how creepy Mr. B is. There’s something rote about the idea of a romance between them, though, so I’m glad that the movie ended by leaving it mildly ambiguous, at least. Also, I can’t complain too much about the party scenes, because they do a great job of putting you in the setting of a realistic high school party. I particularly like the shot of Teddy throwing up outside and Emily rubbing his back, asking him if he’s okay and only getting an embarrassed “shut up” in response. Same goes for the shot of Emily staring at herself in the mirror, post-blowjob, with the muffled sounds of the party in the background.
Gia Coppola clearly has a lot of talent, especially as a director. She has a keen understanding of how to elicit emotions through images and sounds, so it’d be wrong to dismiss the movie entirely because of some structural messiness. Still, there were too many moments throughout the movie when I wondered, Where is this all going? What’s the central story here? Last week’s “Funny Ha Ha” proved that I’m okay with plotlessness, but don’t tease me with four central narratives and only half-commit to each of them.
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