Palo Alto -- Film Review

Palo Alto

Directed by Gia Coppola

This film reminded me of the 1985 novel Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis.  It is a similar tale of cultural and psychological disintegration in the youth of the white American upper middle class.  I would judge it good, with some reservations.  The characters are generally well drawn and memorable.  Very distinctive personalities amid a vivid rendering of this superficial, pained, directionless, clueless, youth culture where nobody seems to be able to relate to one another in a constructive way and everyone self-medicates their loneliness and inner turmoil with alcohol and drugs.  I wonder how people who live in Palo Alto regard this film?  These are your children, Palo Alto, do you recognize them?  The film offers nothing in the way of analysis or understanding.  It just presents things the way they are -- or at least as the filmmakers see them.  This probably does reflect the reality of many American young people in the white middle class.  But there are probably also many kids who are never exposed to this kind of cultural, social, psychological, moral, and spiritual  decadence.  If the film is representative, then it means things have not gotten any better since Bret Easton Ellis published Less Than Zero twenty years ago. 

I would like to single out Nat Wolff for a special commendation.  He did an excellent job creating Fred, the out of control, angry teenage boy on the edge of murder and suicide.  It is not easy to create a totally unsympathetic, repulsive persona -- I assume he is acting -- whereas most of the actors in this film were playing roles not far removed from who they actually are.  Emma Roberts did a nice job with April, the confused, conflicted girl, groping her way through this wasteland of blasted people.  She comes the closest to being a sympathetic center of gravity in the film. 

I have some serious reservations about the film.  A number of things did not work.  The most salient was the evolution of Emily (Zoe Levin), the good hearted, lonely girl who looks for love in all the wrong places by providing sex to any and all.  She seems particularly indiscriminate in taking on Fred -- and she doesn't seem to do Fred any real good.  He doesn't improve any on account of her.  She undergoes a dramatic, inexplicable transformation from ready sexual compliance to vicious attack dog, giving Fred his comeuppance by smashing a bottle against his head.  But it doesn't make sense.  It completely nullifies her character and turns her into something completely different without making any kind of convincing transition.  The filmmakers must have decided that we can't just leave a likeable slut alone.  That would be too offensive to American middle class women.  So we have to turn her into a hostile, avenging bitch that we can be more comfortable with.  Unfortunately, it turns Emily into a completely unconvincing shell of a character. 

Another problem is the soccer coach, Mr. B. (James Franco).  Mutual attraction leads to an affair between the coach and April, who also works for him as a babysitter.  But then the coach two times her with another girl on the soccer team.  April finds out, gets upset, and breaks off the relationship.  It completely undermines the credibility of the character of Mr. B. 

But I think the reason this was done is that the filmmakers feel a strong need to discredit this relationship and affirm officially prevailing sexual prejudices.  It is unacceptable in American society for an older man to have a sexual affair with a teenage girl, particularly if he is her teacher or soccer coach.  There is a very strong public profession of this bias in our popular culture.  It is nonsense, of course, like most of our publicly espoused sexual biases, and in fact relationships of this sort go on all the time in high schools all over America.  A certain number of them are exposed and appear fairly frequently in the news media, and people lose their jobs or go to jail on account of them.  However, the vast majority play out in anonymous secrecy.  Our legal system treats these relationships as "rape," although in fact very few of them are actually "rapes."  The film exposes this very clearly for the lie that it is and that is to the film's credit, but then they have to turn around and repudiate the point that they spent a lot of time and effort to make. 

The real problem here is the girl, April.  She is a willing, if not eager, participant in the sexual relationship with the coach.  This makes a mockery of conceptualizing such a relationship as "rape."  This has to be punished.  She can't be allowed to get away with this.  So Mr. B's feelings for April have to be nullified and April has to be made to look like a confused, immature girl who made a foolish mistake which she herself now recognizes.  April comes around to a "right" view that is in line with prevailing disapproval.  The filmmakers must have consulted with the Catholic Church on the script.  So this makes for another degrading blemish on the film. 

Finally, the film is very skittish about male-male sex, and never really deals with it head on.  Teddy (Jack Kilmer) drops in on Fred at his house when he happens to be out and comes inside to share a joint with Fred's father.  A seduction attempt by the father on Teddy is hinted at but abruptly terminated before it gets a chance to go anywhere.  Later, near the end of the film, Fred's inclination toward the same sex is obliquely suggested and then quickly repudiated.  But he had shown no such interest at any time earlier in the film.  I think the filmmakers introduced this in order to tar him further by implying he is gay after having Emily cut his head open with a bottle.  If they had really wanted to take this issue seriously they should have made the sexual attraction between Fred and Teddy evident from the beginning.  But the filmmakers don't really know what to do with this subject. 

So while this is a seriously flawed film, its characters and its portrayal of the disintegrating culture in which they struggle for their emotional survival are strong enough to hold a viewer's interest and attention.  It presents the sexual preoccupations of lonely, lost teenagers in the white upper middle class, but in the end affirms the conventional moral judgments on human relations that American audiences (or censors) will insist on.  This severely limits the film and gives it an atmosphere of ordinariness when it could have been a bold challenge to our normal judgmental attitudes.  The film does a very good job of depicting the social and psychological decay and disintegration that is the outcome of our archaic, oppressive sexual culture that fails utterly to offer young people an avenue of sexual relatedness that is positive and constructive, but in the end it simply reiterates those very values and prejudices that are the root of the problem. It had the potential to be a truly great film, but fell down on account of the mediocre, conventional vision of the director and script writers.