Palo Alto (2014)

Palo Alto arrives as a mood piece about affluent California teenagers drifting through boredom, alcohol, and casual cruelty. Gia Coppola, directing from James Franco's short story collection, keeps the camera at a cool distance, letting pastel suburbia and long silences do the heavy lifting. The result observes its characters without ever quite diagnosing them, which reads as either restraint or avoidance depending on the viewer's patience.

There is a faint feminist current here, mostly because the movie takes seriously what happens to its teenage girls. April, played by Emma Roberts, is groomed by her soccer coach, a man who trades playing time for babysitting and eventually for something worse. Emily endures a different flavor of exploitation at the hands of a boy who brags about it afterward. Coppola frames these episodes with quiet disgust, and a female director turning her gaze on predatory male behavior counts for something. It is not a thesis. The film never stops to explain itself, and it offers no lesson beyond the sourness of the experience.

Everything else sits at zero. The cast is uniformly white, the concerns are uniformly suburban, and the movie has no interest in race, class, sexuality, the environment, or the economic order that produced these bored children. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns. The camera simply watches a boy carve a name into a bench and a girl realize her coach has done this before. For a certain strain of critic, this absence of message will read as honesty. For another, it will read as a beautiful, empty photograph of people we never come to know. The film sides, gently, with the first group.