Review: Palo Alto
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: B+] As accolades go, being the second-best Coppola movie of 2013 isn't too shabby.
City Paper grade: B+
As accolades go, being the second-best Coppola movie of 2013 isn’t too shabby. The first movie by 27-year-old Gia Coppola is better than her uncle Roman’s abortive A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III and her granddad Francis’ Twixt, which finally limped straight to home video last year, but the story of aimless California kids is a pale pastel wash next to her aunt Sofia’s The Bling Ring. It’s an assured debut, if an insubstantial one, but this slightness is part of the point. Early on, two stoned teenagers sit idly in a car and debate the finer points of time travel, then hit the gas and slam the car into a wall. Even with speed, they’re going nowhere.
Palo Alto is drawn, apparently loosely, from a book of short stories by James Franco, but there’s not much story here: Think back, and you’re more likely to remember a mood, or a color palette, than an event. If there’s a core plot, it involves the rapport between Franco’s high school soccer coach and a student played by Emma Roberts, whom he coaxes into a sexual relationship after she babysits his kids. Double, no triple, ick, but Coppola doesn’t just act outraged or horrified so much as she marinates in it, like a teenager soaking up experience for future study.
Coppola’s directorial stance might best be parsed as passive engagement: She’s watching through the wrong end of a telescope, but the distance gives her perspective. It’s hard to feel like anything matters, but that malaise is a defense mechanism as well as a means of alienation. Here, adolescence is less a crucible than a gauntlet; the trick is to keep your head down and get through it any way you can. In Palo Alto’s Palo Alto, the kids aren’t all right, and they aren’t in danger: They just are.
