VivaSync

Gia Coppola makes her directorial debut with a faithfully slight adaptation of James Franco's short story collection

Anyone for the poetry of doomed youth? Thankfully the angst is at a minimum in Gia Coppola’s directorial debut. Palo Alto is adapted from a short story collection by James Franco in which he made fitful record of his own high-school flirtations with the edge. Like his art, most of Franco’s misbehavior was experimental in nature, poised somewhere between attention-getting and boredom – public intoxication, pot, car-jacking, drunk-driving – and the stiffest penalty his teenage alter ego incurs is community service at a local old folks' home.

Wisely, the 27-year-old Coppola has honored the half-heartedness of his drift into semi-oblivion. Her film is less a portrait of a generation in trouble, more a generation toying lazily with the idea of getting into trouble. It’s about teenage drift, the sunken torpor of late summer afternoons, the sun casting almost horizontal shadows across largely empty parking lots that seem to cry out for something to happen. It’s about the blank spaces in teenage heads and lives, and what they do to fill them.

Emma Roberts plays April, one her high school’s last remaining virgins, who has an unrequited crush on Teddy (Jack Kilmer). Teddy is a mop-haired stoner who, together with his friend Fred (Nat Wolff), is busy ingesting whatever substance the pair can lay their hands on, strapping fireworks to the backs of their skateboards, and other such pressing Euclidean experiments. The film begins with the two boys in a car, tying themselves in knots with a series of historical what-if's before accelerating into a wall, whooping it up afterwards like Butch and Sundance. You get the spirit of their disaffection – “Where are we going?” “Fucking nowhere” – but you also get the stuntedness of their rebellion: the run-up between car and wall was about three feet. They were parked in a car lot. Coppola lingers on a milkshake that one of them has dropped on the tarmac, as if taking in a splatter painting by Jackson Pollock.

The general rule with movies about wasted youth seems to be that what you gain in authenticity of voice you lose in thrust of narrative: you can be unpatronisingly embedded in the plotlessness of teenage life, like Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, or you can jack the whole thing into something vaguely apocalyptic designed to catch the attention of parents, like Larry Clarke’s Kids or Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park and Elephant.

Coppola splits the difference, shooting with a style of candyheart impressionism borrowed from her aunt Sofia – a layering of sweet synth pop on the soundtrack and close-ups with narrow depth of field – that offsets any intimations of doom with a smattering of sherbet epiphanies. She’s too cool for wake-up calls or alarm bells. The drunken disports at a party are treated to a burst of slow-motion – thrashing heads, fountains of rum punch – the images riding a knife-edge between the glorious and the grotesque, but the kicker is the aftermath. There is a pair of rabbit-embroidered socks sticking from the end of bed, as if in admonitory reminder: these kids were just kids a few years ago. The flora and fauna of their rooms include teddybears and lipstick.

Coppola has inherited some of her aunt’s eye for cool composition. She loves to pose Roberts against repetitive, bland, pastel-colored surfaces: a locker room, a row of toilet cubicles, the prefab blockish architecture of her school, the aquamarine of a swimming pool (still the backdrop du jour for disaffected youth, along with fish tanks, 40 years after The Graduate), until Roberts’ pale, luminous beauty pops. She could easily be one of the suburban sphinxes from The Virgin Suicides, but for the vividness of her reactions. Hurt when Teddy absconds for a blow job with someone else, April retreats to her room to practice imaginary brush-offs – “I don’t care ... Whatever ...” She’s more easily bruised than she lets on.

The plot, such as it is, consists of the question of whether these two will manage to get it together. The obstacles include: keg parties, hook-ups with other more available partners, and the attentions of April’s soccer coach teacher, played with smirking self-deprecation by James Franco himself. Franco seems to delight in playing sketchy dudes on the fringes of dramas about teen disaffection; playing villain in his own short story collection doubtless appealed to his voluminous sense of irony. April’s eventual surrender to him is dramatized with a terrific understanding for the role sex plays in teenagers' lives, somewhere between self-exploration and power-play: sucked under by a bad day, April asserts herself the only way she can think of, by sleeping with teacher.

Roberts is the standout. Away from her, the film drifts and drags, and some of the image-making is rote: hands playing dolphin out of moving car windows, cascading hair on a summer’s day, and I could have done without the dead plants in the office of the school counselor, as if to spell out her lack of green fingers (would you trust this woman with your psychological development?). All of the adults in the film are tried and found guilty of ulterior motives and wayward agendas: an art teacher babbling of his near-death experience, April’s pot-smoking dad (Val Kilmer) and a mom whose concern for her daughter is limited to a single, repeated “Are you depressed?”.

In their original form, Franco’s tales seems stung with the realization, which comes to all teenage narcissisists sooner or later, that the adults with whom one comes into contact as a teenager are not all operating with one’s best interests at heart, 24 hours a day. Big shocker. But Coppola seems to have sensed the slightness at the heart of these stories and, with that lack of humbug that is the prerogative of novice directors, has not done anything to cover for it. Someone with more ego at stake might have been tempted to make more of a “statement”. But the slightness is what’s interesting about these lives, which have been limned gracefully by the 27-year-old director. The green fingers are hers.

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