{"id":12123,"date":"2014-06-09T20:42:10","date_gmt":"2014-06-10T03:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=12123"},"modified":"2014-06-09T20:42:54","modified_gmt":"2014-06-10T03:42:54","slug":"palo-alto-film-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/palo-alto-film-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Palo Alto — Film Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Palo Alto<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Directed by Gia Coppola<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This film reminded me of the 1985 novel Less Than Zero<\/em>, by Bret Easton Ellis.\u00a0 It is a similar tale of cultural and psychological disintegration in the youth of the white American upper middle class.\u00a0 I would judge it good, with some reservations.\u00a0 The characters are generally well drawn and memorable.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I wonder how people who live in Palo Alto regard this film?\u00a0 These are your children, Palo Alto, do you recognize them?\u00a0 The film offers nothing in the way of analysis or understanding.\u00a0 It just presents things the way they are — or at least as the filmmakers see them.\u00a0 This probably does reflect the reality of many American young people in the white middle class.\u00a0 But there are probably also many kids who are never exposed to this kind of cultural, social, psychological, moral, and spiritual \u00a0decadence.\u00a0 If the film is representative, then it means things have not gotten any better since Bret Easton Ellis published Less Than Zero<\/em> twenty years ago.<\/p>\n

I would like to single out Nat Wolff for a special commendation.\u00a0 He did an excellent job creating Fred, the out of control, angry teenage boy on the edge of murder and suicide.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Emma Roberts did a nice job with April, the confused, conflicted girl, groping her way through this wasteland of blasted people.\u00a0 She comes the closest to being a sympathetic center of gravity in the film.<\/p>\n

I have some serious reservations about the film.\u00a0 A number of things did not work.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She seems particularly indiscriminate in taking on Fred — and she doesn’t seem to do Fred any real good.\u00a0 He doesn’t improve any on account of her.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But it doesn’t make sense.\u00a0 It completely nullifies her character and turns her into something completely different without making any kind of convincing transition.\u00a0 The filmmakers must have decided that we can’t just leave a likeable slut alone.\u00a0 That would be too offensive to \u00a0American middle class women. \u00a0So we have to turn her into a hostile, avenging bitch that we can be more comfortable with.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it turns Emily into a completely unconvincing shell of a character.<\/p>\n

Another problem is the soccer coach, Mr. B. (James Franco).\u00a0 Mutual attraction leads to an affair between the coach and April, who also works for him as a babysitter.\u00a0 But then the coach two times her with another girl on the soccer team.\u00a0 April finds out, gets upset, and breaks off the relationship.\u00a0 It completely undermines the credibility of the character of Mr. B.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There is a very strong public profession of this bias in our popular culture.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 However, the vast majority play out in anonymous secrecy.\u00a0 Our legal system treats these relationships as “rape,” although in fact very few of them are actually “rapes.”\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The real problem here is the girl, April.\u00a0 She is a willing, if not eager, participant in the sexual relationship with the coach.\u00a0 This makes a mockery of conceptualizing such a relationship as “rape.” \u00a0This has to be punished.\u00a0 She can’t be allowed to get away with this.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 April comes around to a “right” view that is in line with prevailing disapproval.\u00a0 The filmmakers must have consulted with the Catholic Church on the script.\u00a0 So this makes for another degrading blemish on the film.<\/p>\n

Finally, the film is very skittish about male-male sex, and never really deals with it head on.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 A seduction attempt by the father on Teddy is hinted at but abruptly terminated before it gets a chance to go anywhere.\u00a0 Later, near the end of the film, Fred’s inclination toward the same sex is obliquely suggested and then quickly repudiated.\u00a0 But he had shown no such interest at any time earlier in the film.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But the filmmakers don’t really know what to do with this subject.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The film does a very good job of depicting the social and psychological decay and disintegration that is the outcome<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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Palo Alto Directed by Gia Coppola   \u00a0 This film reminded me of the 1985 novel Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis.\u00a0 It is a similar tale of cultural…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12123","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"