Palo Alto

Originally Posted Tuesday, June 17, 2014

As I drove to work yesterday morning, I passed the little art house movie theater and noticed the marquee--"Palo Alto."  Later that afternoon, I decided that  Monday's six-thirty show would be perfect.  Nobody goes to movies on Monday.  I'd get a good seat at a small table on the main floor.  I'd buy some popcorn and beer and sit in the dark alone for awhile.  I was full of emotion about something that had happened earlier and wanted to let the feeling wash over me.  I was feeling alive and more than a little romantic. 

The reviews of the movie are deceiving.  It is a mediocre movie at best.  At worst, it is jejune.  And it is almost always tedious.  There is nothing memorable about the cinematography.  Characters are framed in unremarkable ways.  It could easily be a student film.  Still, afterwards I found myself thinking about the blank moodiness of it, the morose lives it presented, the terrible victimhood we are supposed to assume is inherited.  Gia Coppola adapted the screenplay from James Franco's short story collection by the same name.  Franco financed the film and plays the movie's most pronounced adult role, a girl's high school soccer coach who seduces one of his students, a virgin for whom, by and large, we have sympathy.  It is for this reason, I assume, that reviewers almost universally refer to his character as "sleazy." 

What stands out to me, though, is that he is really no better or worse than anyone else in the movie.  His life is as empty and hollow as every other character portrayed in the film.  He responds to the only thing that is beautiful in his world.  Certainly his reaching is crippled, but he is a cripple in a crippled cosmos.  The kids of Palo Alto who dominate the film are a terrible and sorry lot of wasted youth and beauty who cannot be expected to mature into anything better than what they have seen.  The movie is a recriminating tale of perpetual doom.  I can't view Franco's character as anything but another of the menagerie of sufferers collected here.  "I love you," is the movie's hollow refrain.  Sex is its sordid demon. 

Still, the film portrays a better world than the one I grew up in.  As a teen, I could only hope to step up to the hollow emptiness of a Palo Alto.  And of this, I hope, Franco and Coppola were acutely aware.  In the end, it seems, the movie is a paean to the awful whining of the semi-privileged. 

The popcorn was stale and the beer was ordinary.  But in spite all of that, I felt the afternoon had been a victory.  I had broken a pattern, stepped away from my routine.  The sun was sinking when I came out of the theater's darkness.  The small living room of a lobby was filling up with the next quarry.  I felt something I used to feel that is kith to a romantic freedom if not an actual longing.  Simply a mood, really, an atmosphere in which to bathe. 

There is contrition this morning, of course, for what I abandoned, the things that were left undone. But I woke early thinking of the other incident, the unspoken affair that shakes my solitude and threatens my zen. 

It seems somehow too awful to awaken and to be alive.