Overall Rating: A
“I was a little too tall, could’ve used a few pounds. Tight pants points hardly renowned. She was a black haired beauty with big dark eyes.”
So opens Bob Seger’s nostalgic ballad of youthful misadventure, “Night Moves,” about two teenagers who over the course of a summer learn about love and lust and most importantly themselves, growing up in the process, whether they’ve been aware of it or not.
There is a moment in Palo Alto in which protagonist April is sitting, very much against her will, with a college counselor at her school. She is attacked with a slew of questions that everyone her age confronts, like it or not – what does she want to study, what type of college does she see herself at? Only a few moments after she cries it out in the girls room, an old, odd art instructor tells a story. He was driving a convertible, it goes, down a cold, mysterious tunnel when he says to himself, “Bob, this isn’t your convertible; you’re not even Bob.”
Palo Alto takes a uniquely generous look at a strange yet all too familiar arrangement of high schoolers, who during their junior year are forced – by adults, by each other, even by themselves – to find and settle on some sort of identity. April, played by the beautiful Emma Roberts in a milestone performance, is at a cross roads. She’s not as grown up as she thinks, with perfectly written dialogue to define her age (“What does that even mean?”). She feels the stresses of the ever-approaching deadline at which she should know who she is. Is she the sort of girl who responsibly babysits, or one who fraternizes with older men? Is she “raging or just chilling”? Is she a virgin like her friends profess her to be? Hey, she could even be Bob.
What all of this demand for forward-mindedness results in is what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice. When what is in front of you is so open-ended, so limitless, the strain of picking a direction leads people simply not to make any decision and to remain sedentary, stagnant, to embrace only what is readily in front of you. For the teens in Palo Alto, this means a perfectly disorganized agenda of soccer practice and drinking parties, volunteering and date rape. One could say that this is a movie about addiction, about lust, about age discrimination, or any other slew of academic topics. Really, it is all of these, because it is about growing up, the angst of inevitably approaching the end of something. April feels it. So do her friends Fred and Teddy and her teammates. But I would still hardly call it a communal process, as the most important people in the lives of school age kids are adults.
Their parents, teachers, coaches lord over them, serving the dual roles of idol and tyrant. April’s mother is hopelessly incompetent and her step-father is that much worse, spending his days playing video games and proudly dedicating his time to high school history papers. Teddy’s father is as disrespectful as he is, but without the excuse of being an angst-laden teenager. Fred’s father at the very least does illegal drugs, but also might be a promiscuous closeted homosexual. This forces the troubled kids, at the most emotionally demanding time in their lives, to seek someone else to look up to. Teddy, forced into community service builds relationships with the elderly people he helps care for in the hospital. This is a healthy choice, a wise fall back after rebelling from home. The fact that it is made because of a judge’s requirement for volunteer time is omnipresent, but in the shadows. His best friend Fred and his romantic interest April do not do as well. Fred falls deeper and deeper into his habits of self-harm, developing alcohol and marijuana dependence as well as a sexual hunger that puts his relationships in jeopardy. April falls for an older man, the father of the boy she babysits and her soccer coach, played by James Franco – incidentally, the renaissance man wrote the book on which the film is based.
Palo Alto is directed by Gia Coppola (yes, of those Coppolas) in her feature directing debut, and it proves the immense talents of the rookie filmmaker. Each shot is placed meticulously, anticipating characters’ movement and quickly establishing a striking array of color pallets in different moments. The camera is a tool that aids the filmmaker in telling a story, in creating character, not only in capturing what it sees. Coppola uses it to great effect, capturing characters as individuals; even if there is a crowd of four girls as in an early sequence, they are cropped so only the speaker is on screen, making painfully aware the fact that these people are at a lonely, helpless time in their lives.
When Franco’s coach tells April he loves her, he says that she shouldn’t just be with “boys” her age because: “You’re better than that.” As an audience we acknowledge that this might be true; April has done a better job than most at avoiding the hedonistic traditions of one’s teens, so often given an affectionate angle as “rights of passage.” But we also know that she definitely deserves better than this man, who is essentially preying on a younger girl who gets giddy at hearing that she’s pretty. Just assuming that as the older, more mature individual he gets the moral high ground is one of the cultural criticisms that I hold dear and this film seeks to discuss. Agism, prejudices associated with age, are a problem. In Palo Alto the case isn’t made that young people can be equally mature, it is that nobody is completely mature. The parents are no different from their high school kids. The coach and these teenagers have the same, shameful desire to exploit silly girls. The senior citizens at the hospital seem just as aimless and helpless as they put glasses on to look at art, as a little boy putting on a tiger-mask to watch a movie. Right after the first physical encounter between Franco’s and Roberts’s characters, her April is shown riding in a car, hand and hair out the window catching the breeze. Innocent enough, she is a kid coming into her own and this image represents her freedom. But notice that Coppola put her in the backseat of the car, being driven around like a child.
The film tensely winds down in a clever, deliberate bookend to the beginning. “I’d be the king,” says Teddy when asked what he’d do if he were in the middle ages in the first scene. In a final scene, he’s asked about being an ancient Egyptian, and says, “I’d be pharaoh.” In both cases, Fred is wreckless with the car and the relationship of this delightfully weird pair is in focus. They are Ernie and Bert. Fred is tall, charismatic, funny. Teddy, none of those things, but he seems more kind, more self-aware. Fred is played by Nat Wolff, a revelation in a star-making turn. He is the less featured and less layered character, but his explosively physical performance was a thrill to watch and more of a thrill to think what’s next. He flips from giddy, to violent, to goofy, to reckless all in the natural, bipolar flow of adolescence. Even as they note that they don’t do a whole lot, basically just hang out, they know that together everything is more exciting – for better or worse – than at home.
As is the thesis of Palo Alto. It focuses on demonstrating the life of the mundane. Coppola peppers in a montage of still clips of playground toys, unmoving relics of when these people were children. The film makes reference to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, showing it on television before April flips the channel to some standard reality program. Palo Alto is neither a teen sex-comedy or a too true melodrama. It is a coming of age piece – in spite of leaving characters right where they started – about the ordinary, the march of time and its affect on people. There is another movie about to hit theaters, Boyhood, which follows a boy from first grade into college. Palo Alto is like a close reading of a small part of that evolution, where nothing momentous happens; but homework, sitting in a locker, jealous banter, bouncing on couches, drawing penises and endlessly flirting fill days and nights and as much as these kids want to rid themselves of it, they all certainly know they will miss it when it’s gone.
Ain’t it funny how the night moves?
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