Palo Alto is clearly a movie about the high school experience and what it means to be part of “Gen Z”, the elusive genre of teenager living through the 2010s. However, as an actual member of Gen Z--a sixteen year old junior in high school-- Palo Alto misses the mark by a long shot. Rather than a fresh perspective on modern adolescence, the movie is written from the dated perspective of middle-aged director Gia Coppola.
It would be a crime to not compare Palo Alto to its predecessor, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999). Of course, there’s the obvious familial connection. Gia Coppola (the director of Palo Alto) is Sofia Coppola’s (the director of The Virgin Suicides) niece. Both films are their respective directorial debuts.
But there are other more, perhaps more significant, similarities: specifically, the cinematography, themes, and plot. Form over function, an emphasis on the unspoken, and themes of human connection (or lack thereof) run amok in both films-- but the elder Coppola certainly pulls them off better.
Sofia and Gia Coppola both incorporate gorgeous, faded, greyed pastels, blues upon blues upon blues (see below). There are many semi-symmetrical ensemble shots, usually of nymph-like teenage girls. The form is delicious, soft and unabrasive, and silently brooding all at once. Nostalgic and beautiful yet with a subtext of looming dread, just like high school, just like teenagers and the ever-looming fear of growing up.
To that point, the two movies also converge theme-wise. They capture the in-betweens of childhood and adulthood, where teenagers play adults and drink too much beer at a party, but ultimately submit to the authority of their “overly strict” parents. The main characters in both movies, Emma Roberts and--arguably--Kirsten Dunst, are growing into identities that they themselves don’t understand, and there is a tenderness in both movies-- a sense that Emma Roberts (a 30 year old actress playing a senior in high school) is just a tall ten-year-old who continues to scrape her arm on the playground.
Finally, plot-wise, there are obvious similarities. Sofia Coppola continually uses the small vignettes, little snapshots of the main character’s life, to communicate a semi-cohesive plot. However, it is more character based than anything. Similarly, Palo Alto zeros in on Emma Roberts, abandoning a clear plot arc and clear character development in favor of brief moments: joking with friends at a graveyard, hooking up with an ill-intentioned boy at a party, and lounging in her room, boredly poking at her technology.
However, Palo Alto thoroughly misses the coming-of-age so perfectly elucidated in The Virgin Suicides, and that is purely because Palo Alto not only lacks a plot, it lacks real characters. April (Emma Roberts), even as the main character, has no defining traits other than her lack of defining traits.
Of course, you might argue, in The Virgin Suicides, Lux’s only characteristic was her beauty and her rebellious-ness, while Cecilia’s was her fervor for environmentalism and existential angst. And the other sisters, Therese, Mary, and Bonnie, don’t really have personality traits at all. But in this movie, their lack of depth was for a reason. The movie is from the voyeuristic perspective of neighbor boys investigating the nature of the sisters’ suicide-- the entire point of the Lisbon sisters, their symbolic meaning, is the mystery of being a teenage girl: that no matter how hard you look, the essence of female-coming-of-age shys to be revealed.
Palo Alto simultaneously keeps the mystery, the lack of clear character traits, and takes away the symbolism of it, rendering the device meaningless. The only thing that could save this lack of depth is a compelling plot-- but no, there’s not one of those either (of course this might be due to the source material, as both films are literary adaptations-- Sofia has Eugenides’ expert prose to work with, while Gia has James Franco’s meandering parables of spoiled teenagers and hate speech).
So maybe we can chalk up the failure of Palo Alto to the less-than-stellar source material. However, regardless of that limitation, Gia Coppola’s directorial debut is lackluster at best. Sofia reigns supreme in the archetypical indie-coming-of-age film about the teenage feminine mystique, and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future.
Commenti