If you want to see how three white, spoiled upper middle class high school losers spend their time outside of school then Palo Alto is the movie for you. I’m 32 years old so I’m 14 years removed from the life of a high school student so I’m probably going to come across as the “get off my lawn” old man, but do all teenagers party, excessively drink, smoke cigarettes, weed and other substances all the time? When I was in high school I never had anything close to that experience and neither did my friends. Granted, I was kind of a nerd, but I wasn’t at the level of Sam Weir, Neal Schweiber and Bill Haverchicck from Freaks and Geeks.
When I watch a film I try to emphasize with the characters, but all these characters do is get wasted while their parents do nothing and are getting high themselves. I grew in a suburb in the Bay Area and I never experienced close to anything close to what’s depicted in the movie, but I grew up with kids like the protagonists. The two male protagonists are the types of people who you’ll find working at a Costco their whole life while the female protagonist is attractive enough she’ll end the CMO of a middling app start up that folds in three years. When I was high school I thought those kids were losers and that’s exactly what I was thinking the whole time when I was watching the film.
Maybe I’m missing something and this is a hyper reality. An example of how this could be the case is one of the characters leaves a party after drinking and smoking weed all night, gets into a car, hits another moving vehicle and flees the scene. The character gets caught by the police. When the character goes to court he/she is sentenced to 150 hours of community service and has to give an in-person apology to the person he/she hit.
Even though I didn’t relate to anyone I have no idea what the movie was trying to say? Maybe parents have forgotten to be parents? Kids are growing up without any direction and their only ambition is to party all the time? There were some nice shots and the writer-director definitely had a vision for how she wanted the film to look, but overall I found this movie to be a mess without direction. At one point one of the characters was driving down the freeway on the opposite direction and I was rooting for that person to hit the oncoming traffic. It takes a lot for a movie to get me extremely angry during and after watching a movie, but Palo Alto achieved just that.
Grade: 20 (on the 20-80 scouting scale)
