Actor James Franco, despite all the many manifestations of James Franco the Renaissance Mac Daddy, will ultimately be remembered for how well he performs as an actor. Palo Alto the book was a collection of short stories by James Franco released in 2010. Those stories in turn were developed into a film by Franco, who handpicked Gia Coppola (Sophia Coppola's niece) to direct for her feature film debut—she was chosen, in part, on the basis of her still photography work.
The film features a fantastic score by Dev Hynes, which will make anything that looks good look even better by sounding incredible. The only knock is that Hynes's music does little to aid in overcoming the main obstacle for the film: achieving a harmony between critically observing youth and romanticizing it.
More tightly-plotted than its print counterpart, the film loosely centers on Emma Roberts's Popular-Athlete-Virgin April who has an affair with Franco's Divorced-Father-Soccer-Coach Mr. B. There's also Artist-Introvert-Nice Guy Teddy (played by Jack Kilmer, Val Kilmer's son!) misbehaving with his Teenage-Sociopath-Bad Influencer pal Fred, quite alarmingly performed by Nat Wolff.
These are archetypes, but that is the point. Don't try finding much beneath the surface. Once you start to think that everything Franco touches is a self-referential trick, you're already too far gone. Also, this is Coppola's film, and it shines as hers, particularly when she focuses tightly in on her teenage subjects, granting their private after-school moments the gravity they deserve.
Despite being well-worn, those clichés manage to make the film richer, perhaps because it approaches its subjects so earnestly. There is one particularly brilliant scene which finds April in a college planning session with a school guidance counselor who is asking her a series of banal questions that highlights these abrupt and unexpected limits of growing up which one encounters in high school: most adults are as clueless as the kids, no one prepares you for this shit and everyone has get through life on their own.
That earnestness has limits, though, and the film tends to err on the side of unproductively romanticizing the teenage experience, rather than evocatively luxuriating in the adolescent mundane, in order to elevate the stakes. One wonders what kind of film it would be without Franco, and without the handful of flirtations with real, destructive violence. What if it was just the boring stuff?
James Franco (Courtesy of Tribeca Film)
Watch for the understated performance by Jack Kilmer, who truly anchored the film by remaining a kid apart from the too-cool-to-be-real parties and his mercurial best friend. For Teddy, getting out unscathed is the main goal, which seems to be universal. Emma Roberts carries a big load—and is the most famous face that we see the most often—and she oscillates adeptly between vulnerability and confidence like the most confused of teenagers.
As for that best friend, Nat Wolff gives a legitimately terrifying performance, all kinetic, maladjusted angst bursting at the seams behind his dead/stoned gaze. You tense up when he comes on screen, for no real reason. We know that nothing really bad will happen, but that frightening potential is always close by—that possibility that the real world will encroach too far and pop this psychic bubble we build around our children and childhood. That's what growing up is, though: pushing limits and buttons in a vacuum whose seal is rarely compromised.
I suppose that is an indication of one of the strengths of the film—by taking the mundanities of every moment that structures the adolescent experience with such a tight focus and conviction, it develops an anxious dread that clings to every scene. The whole point of being a kid is a tangled knot of contradictions: not understanding how you fit into the world, being isolated from everything and everyone, not being taken seriously, not taking certain things seriously, being incapable of comprehending what lies ahead, unaware of the consequences of the past, being revered and maligned by adults at the same time for representing the reality of loss and the promise of the future, a difficulty grasping memory—the interminable list goes on.
We get sidetracked so easily by the tiny bit of irrelevant intrigue Franco guarantees. Everything is a conspiracy. For what it's worth, I genuinely can't tell if Franco is a good actor or not. He is so much himself in everything that he does that we don't ever cast him to be anything other than James Franco. For an actor whose solipsism grows increasingly opaque, that might not be enough.
