Overview
Palo Alto should come with a warning: may cause optic nerve damage as a result of excessive eye-rolling. Adapted from a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories by Instagram-age Renaissance man James Franco, the film marks the directorial debut of 26-year-old Gia Coppola, the granddaughter and niece of filmmakers Francis Ford and Sofia, respectively. A portrait of teenage disaffection, it's a film that attempts to capture the aimlessness, the angst and the self-aggrandised melancholy of youth. That it more or less succeeds in that goal is a big part of what makes it so unbearable.
Emma Robert and newcomer Jack Kilmer play April and Teddy, a pair of brooding high schoolers absorbed by personal drama. He's a delinquent skater who's actually an unappreciated artist; she's the neglected daughter of self-absorbed parents who begins an affair with her creepy soccer coach (Franco). Meanwhile, Teddy's best bud Fred (Nate Wolff) finds himself drawn to increasingly anti-social behaviour to hide his insecurities, while another classmate Emily (Zoe Levine) turns to sex in order to hide her own.
While Coppola and Franco do their best to depict the nuances of teenage ennui, their interlocking stories end up bringing little new material to what is already an over-saturated genre. Likewise, while the mannerisms of the characters feel pretty accurate, the kids ultimately come across more like ciphers than real people. There's little insight into why they do the things that they do, other than they're bored, perhaps, or feel entitled. Or maybe the world just, like, doesn't understand.
Coppola's direction shows promise, only to fall into indie film cliché. Midnight strolls through deserted streets look as though they've been pulled from a Smashing Pumpkins music video circa 1996, while some of the visual metaphors — Fred driving the wrong way down the freeway, for example — are way too obvious to be profound.
Despite this stumble, there's enough in Palo Alto to suggest the youngest Coppola may have a future ahead of her. You'd be less inclined to be charitable towards Franco, whose aggressive desire to be taken seriously makes it basically impossible to do so.