{"id":6937,"date":"2015-11-16T21:53:01","date_gmt":"2015-11-17T01:53:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arts.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=6937"},"modified":"2015-11-16T21:53:01","modified_gmt":"2015-11-17T01:53:01","slug":"weekend-watch-palo-alto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2015\/11\/16\/weekend-watch-palo-alto\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Watch – \u201cPalo Alto\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are too many interesting things about \u201cPalo Alto\u201d to write it off completely, but not enough coherence or real substance to ever really fall in love with it.<\/p>\n

To start off, the performances are pretty great. I\u2019m used to seeing Emma Roberts as the gloriously bitchy characters of Ryan Murphy\u2019s shows (\u201cAmerican Horror Story\u201d and \u201cScream Queens\u201d), 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\u2019ll 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 \u201cPaper Towns.\u201d Both as a figure of hilariously obnoxious comic relief and as one of the film\u2019s antagonists, Wolff is a standout.<\/p>\n

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Coppola has clearly inherited the directorial prowess of her famous filmmaking family; the whole movie is shot so well, especially with Autumn Durald\u2019s cinematography. With the help of Devont\u00e9 Hynes\u2019s strong score, Coppola imbues every scene with feeling. The movie is great at crafting images and creating a feeling<\/em> 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\u2019s face repeatedly being swept over with black. It\u2019s one of the most horrifying sex scenes I\u2019ve seen in recent memory.<\/p>\n

As great as Coppola is at conveying desperation, horror, and shame, I couldn\u2019t help but get the suspicion that all this great camerawork was covering up a lack of substance. Now, I\u2019m a believer that just because a feeling is achieved through aesthetics doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t genuine\u2014there are plenty of stories with average screenplays that enter the cinematic canon because of their directorial work\u2014so the knowledge that the visual and auditory elements of the film were covering up some spotty writing didn\u2019t make the emotional impact feel illusory to me. That said, it did<\/em> make it easy for my mind to drift away from the narrative now and then.<\/p>\n

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The main reason for that, I think, is that there isn\u2019t really a central narrative. The movie is ostensibly about the relationship between April and Mr. B, and there\u2019s 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\u2019s narrative, Teddy\u2019s narrative, Fred\u2019s, and supporting character Emily\u2019s (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\u2019s story is the most unimaginative\u2014he has to do community service after drunkenly getting into a car accident, but he mostly just sulks around, smokes weed, and navel-gazes\u2014but I still got into his story after watching him for a few consecutive scenes\u2026and 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\u2019ve been. \u201cPalo Alto\u201d is adapted from James Franco\u2019s book of short stories, so maybe this explains it\u2014Coppola probably should\u2019ve focused either on April or Emily exclusively as protagonists, but she tries to cram too much into one movie.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve been more effective if Coppola had focused exclusively on one night, like \u201cDazed and Confused,\u201d 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\u2019s clearly supposed to be the \u2018right guy\u2019 who she ends up with once she realizes how creepy Mr. B is. There\u2019s something rote about the idea of a romance between them, though, so I\u2019m glad that the movie ended by leaving it mildly ambiguous, at least. Also, I can\u2019t 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\u2019s okay and only getting an embarrassed \u201cshut up\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019d 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\u2019s the central story here?<\/em> Last week\u2019s \u201cFunny Ha Ha\u201d proved that I\u2019m okay with plotlessness, but don\u2019t tease me with four central narratives and only half-commit to each of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are too many interesting things about \u201cPalo Alto\u201d 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\u2019m used to seeing Emma Roberts as the gloriously bitchy characters of Ryan Murphy\u2019s shows (\u201cAmerican Horror Story\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6937"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2178"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6938,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6937\/revisions\/6938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}