Gone Girl: PAPER TOWNS

Paper Towns introduces us to an intriguing character and decides it doesn’t want to tell her story. She’s Margo, a high school senior who is charismatic and mysterious, the sort of teenager others gossip about, inventing crazy escapades that are almost believable just because she’s so unpredictable and unknowable. Carrying herself with the intense faux-literary soulful gazes of too-cool-for-school types, she’s a reader and a thinker, prone to waxing philosophical while pulling pranks. She has supermodel good looks (because she’s played by one, Cara Delevingne) and a sharp mind, intimidating all around. These are understandable reasons for Quentin (Nat Wolff), the shy nerd who lives across the street, to nurse an unrequited crush. The two teens each bring a particular flavor to the film. She’s a fully stocked spice rack. He’s a sleeve of undercooked Wonder Bread. Want to guess which one becomes our protagonist?

The film opens with its best sequence, an escapade that brings boy and girl together. One late night, she shows up at his bedroom window to conscript his assistance. Her now ex-boyfriend has been cheating with one of her best friends and no one told her. She’s out to prank them all. Margo gets Quentin to be her getaway driver, heading out in his minivan, sneaking into homes of her former friends and, say, leaving a dead fish in the closet, or shaving an eyebrow off a bad bro. It’s all in good fun, and of course Quentin falls even more in love with her as, finished with their mission, they watch the sun come up over Orlando while dancing to a Muzak version of “Lady in Red.” There’s a warm sense of discovery here. Who is this girl?

We don’t get to find out. The next morning, Margo has disappeared. She’s run away from home, seemingly leaving no trace. It’s not the first time, we learn. But this time, Quentin takes it personally. How could she flee after such a magical night with him? Sure enough, he finds some clues, making him a painfully bland protagonist for a limp scavenger hunt, while reducing her to a set of facile puzzle pieces. She’s gone and taken the film’s most intriguing character with her. Instead we focus on the vaguely defined Quentin and his dumb friends (Justice Smith and Austin Abrams, doing what they can with awkward and overfamiliar comic relief) as they talk about girls and prom and senioritis, while slowly trying to figure out where Margo went and why.

Eventually, the guys think they’ve figured out her destination and decide to road trip there, with two girls from school (Halston Sage and Jaz Sinclair) tagging along as well. What follows is standard teen movie shenanigans – social bonding, worrying about drinking and sex, pop culture references, partying, worrying about the future – strung along a mystery that never feels particularly urgent. Director Jake Schreier doesn’t do much with the camera beyond keep the proceedings slick and in frame, while coaxing decent work from underwritten roles as the group of characters never comes into clear focus. They’re background players for our plain, foolishly lovesick, lead. Meanwhile, the logistics of their plan (what about money? or parents?) never becomes a concern. And why doesn’t Margo’s family get more worked up about a clear missing person case. It’s waved off with an overly convenient explanation in half a scene.

The screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, adapted from a book by John Green, doesn’t have the same sharply drawn characters or well-earned sentimentality of their previous collaboration, The Fault in Our Stars. It may share the Green formula of moody kids and quirky habits, deep thoughts and hard emotions. But there’s a hollow feeling to this one, a flat, uncurious dawdling. It creates three stereotypical high school guys, a little dumb and a lot blinkered. They’re just not interesting or complicated, remaining thinly developed types. (The girls are instantly more remarkable without ever getting the chance to step into the spotlight and prove it.) There are some charming moments – an impromptu Pokémon sing-along, a coincidentally timely Confederate flag joke – but I never felt invested in these characters or their relationships.

An almost reasonably diverting road trip, the movie is nonetheless haunted by the one character who isn’t even around for most of it, who in her brief appearances is so much more interesting than the people we actually follow. By the time we learn what happened to Margo, it’s a let down, not because there’s no resolution, but because we’ve come all this way just to see her complete a transformation into a symbol. She makes such an impact in the opening, it’s hard to watch her end up not a character, but a lesson to be learned. She’s too cool for such a fate. The movie ends with Quentin narrating his epiphany, teasing us with info about what Margo was up to, and then saying, “That’s her story to tell.” Something tells me that would’ve been the better story.

Love, Cancer Style: THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

They’re young. They’re in love. They have cancer. She meets him in a support group for kids with terminal illnesses. She needs an oxygen tank to breathe. He has an artificial leg. They’re in remission, but for God only knows how long. She’s only alive because of an experimental treatment. No one knows if and when it’ll stop working. He’s only alive because he gave up part of his leg. They hit it off right away. Their chemistry is immediate, obvious, and overwhelming. They feel comfortable together. Maybe it’s because for them love means never having to say you have cancer.

That’s the basic premise of The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance wrapped tightly around a disease-of-the-week weepy. What makes it work is the strength of the performances, which are clear-eyed and emphatic, and the writing, which is sappy and sentimental, but never loses a sense of humor and perspective. This isn’t a blinkered story of doomed true love. It’s a story about two sick kids who make a connection in what just might be their final days. Rather than letting this possibility weigh the film down, it’s simply accepted as a reality. They’ve been living with their diagnoses for years now. They’re used to it.

The girl, Hazel, is our entry point into the story. Played by Shailene Woodley, she’s a bookish, contemplative girl who appreciates the time she’s given, while wondering why she can’t have the freedom to be a little more of a normal teen. She certainly doesn’t want to go to the support group in the bottom of a church basement, where the sweet man with testicular cancer (Mike Birbiglia) makes everyone listen to his acoustic guitar playing. She goes anyway, and meets Augustus (Ansel Elgort). They can’t keep their eyes off of each other. Afterwards, they hang out. Soon, they text back and forth. It’s a typical modern teen flirtation sliding easily into romance. If it weren’t for the cancer, it’d almost not be worth telling. The disease gives their flirtation underlying, unspoken, urgency.

Woodley and Elgort’s performances are appealing and comfortable. Woodley makes even the corniest narration sound like nothing more than what a reasonably intelligent teenager might be thinking. She has an open face and wet eyes that communicate a sadness and wonder, convincing as a person who has been sick since she was a child, and is tentatively forging a new relationship despite her worry about hurting one more person with her death. Elgort’s hugely charming, playing the type of cocky that can only be compensating for fear. And yet he seems totally at ease. He has to be the dreamiest, most Tiger Beat-ready cancer patient I’ve ever seen, confident and glowing with a love of life. They look good together, banter well, and are easy to root for.

The supporting cast is filled with terrific actors as parents and fellow support group members. Laura Dern is especially good in a role of maternal warmth and care as a woman for whom caring for a terminal child has become second nature. She has a devastating flashback scene, weeping while trying to comfort her hospitalized daughter, that’s so good it’s repeated twice. Nat Wolff, who between this and Palo Alto is cornering the market on troubled-best-friend teen roles, plays a kid with cancer of the eyes, nervously awaiting surgery that’ll leave him blind. That he’s good comedic relief should tell you something about the movie’s approach. It’s not morose or death-obsessed. It’s about people living their lives one day at a time complete with tiny triumphs, interesting anecdotes, sad setbacks, and funny jokes.

There’s nothing visually interesting about the movie. It’s simply lit and full of medium and close-up two shots, what we’d more easily call TV-like before TV went and got a smidge more cinematic at its upper edge. Director Josh Boone gets fine performances out of his cast and keeps the style merely functional, stepping out of the material’s way. It’s based on a popular novel by John Green, who wrote a well-oiled melodrama machine. I mean that in a good way. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (of (500) Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now) retain its most appealing elements, faithfully flavoring a low-key and sympathetic story about families living with a sick child with fantasy romance elements. The main characters have an idealized perfect teen love that’s all the more intense for the cold reality of cancer potentially growing within them.

The movie has a brisk pace, humanizing detail, and a good-humored snap to the dialogue. It hits metaphors a little too hard – a scene drawing a parallel to Anne Frank is misjudged – but, in its simple scenes of characters interacting, it is often deeply felt. It’s gooey, sappy at times, intent on wringing a tear or two out of the audience. But it’s warm, appealing, and never loses sight of the characters, balancing their youthful vitality and the deadly stakes of their conditions. Most importantly, they’re rarely reduced to their types. They’re presented as people who laugh, dream, plan, hope, think, and love. They try not to let their disease define them. That the movie doesn’t either is to its credit. And that’s what makes this glossy, bright, manipulative Hollywood drama an engaging entertainment that can hit authentic, tearful notes.

Teen Spirits: PALO ALTO

On a plot level, there’s little that happens in Palo Alto that looks like my teenage years. And yet, in its evocation of adolescent confusion and uncertainty, it feels achingly true. There’s something about being a teenager that’s incredibly isolating. While you’re living through it, you might think your particular combination of problems are completely your own, that no one could possibly relate. Awkwardness, loneliness, and introspection are closed systems. But then somewhere along the way, as you find getting older leads to perspective, if you let it, a switch is flipped. Suddenly you can see the teenage experience for what it is. Surface details of teen lives differ wildly, but the feelings underneath are universal. The best movies about teens understand this.

The teens in Palo Alto don’t have the perspective about themselves and about the world that would bring their problems into focus. They care too little and too much in the same instant. In the liminal middle of their teenage years, choppy emotional waters rage underneath protective layers of disaffected monotone. It’s written and directed by Gia Coppola, a third-generation director, granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola. She confidently captures an adolescent state of mind with the specificity and sympathy of someone far enough removed to have perspective, but not too far removed to still feel its immediacy. She’s 27 and has a photographer’s eye. The world of the suburban high-schoolers she explores is lived in, captured in details casual and right. It’s not art-directed stylist-driven product-placement “teenage.” It is languorously shot by Autumn Durald, hazily lived in, scuffed-up, stretched, with details that don’t fall off on the sides of the frames.

The film follows four teens through a short period of time in their lives as they drift with anxiety, apathy, and uncertainty. April (Emma Roberts) is shy and sensitive, sweet but often ignored. She finds herself drawn towards and intimidated by male attention, but usually too busy with schoolwork and babysitting to act on it. Teddy (Jack Kilmer, son of Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley, in his debut role) is nice, artistic, and curious, but troubled. He hangs with bad influences and finds himself in trouble with the law. Fred (Nat Wolff) is twitchy and unpredictable. He seems to be play acting “bad kid,” with a quick temper, teasing danger, and affected odd behaviors that make it hard to tell whether he’s only fooling or genuinely disturbed. Emily (Zoe Levin) flirts and fools around with lots of boys. But though she’s willing, her interior life is more conflicted. At one point she hollowly grumbles, “I’ve never been in love.”

They float in similar social circles, their paths crossing from time to time. But even together they seem so lonely, all in the process of figuring out who they are, what they like, and who they will become. They never quite figure it out in the time we spend with them. The film ends before any resolution of that kind. But that’d be too simple anyway. It’s not a film with a big statement about Kids These Days or the State of the American Teenager. It’s not moralizing or message-based. It’s a movie of small gestures and modest shifts within the prickly fog of adolescence. Coppola summons the ambiguity of high school days. These characters are stretching away from the children they so recently were, reaching towards the adults they’ll become. This stretched state is dangerous business.

They’re brooding and troubled, trying on personas, nervous and self-conscious, shyly testing one another. They provoke and are provoked, experimenting with alcohol, drugs, sex, art, music, relationships. The film doesn’t let them off easy while showing a great deal of compassion for them. They’re often photographed alone or in pairs, chatting in cars, sitting in bedrooms, loitering in parking lots and driveways. Most revealing is when they are alone. One kid writes a song on a guitar. Another puts on a dress and tests out flirty poses. They’re free to try the boundaries of their identity most fully when alone. Get them together and the experiments dissect, altering in response to the others.

Adults, and role models in general, are rare. They drop in for platitudes before carrying on with their own preoccupations. There are benign parents, teachers, and judges upholding the line between children and adults. Then there are adults creepily muddling that line. For example, there’s a soccer coach (James Franco, who also wrote the short stories on which the film is based) who stares sleepily, seductively across the line. He’s only a decade or so older than his students, but the developmental importance of those years is painfully obvious. The glimpses of adult life we see on the margins of the teens’ stories are ghosts of future possibilities.

Coppola is content with making Palo Alto a hazy mood piece, getting a contact high off of the characters and their interior struggles acted outwards. She gets relaxed controlled performances out of her young cast. They act like real kids, and the movie watches what they do, how they act, and how it affects them. It hangs back observing, capturing moments in time that are critically important and yet, if they survive, doomed to fade in importance with astonishing speed as they have the rest of their lives ahead of them. When the movie ends, the characters are unresolved, open-ended. They have long ways to go. Some of them are more fully down bad paths with no easy way out. Others have started to hesitantly, incrementally move forward in better directions. This film has the compassion to respect their lived experience and evoke it with care. 

Extracurricular Applications: ADMISSION

Admission is an agreeable diversion. It’s a mellow college comedy set not amongst the students, but among the employees. Specifically, as the title may have revealed for you, it’s set in the admissions department. Our protagonist is Portia, who has been reading Princeton’s college applications and their attendant essays for sixteen years now. Played by Tina Fey, reason enough to like her immediately, she’s a hard-worker firmly settled into her comfortable and predictable life. She’s in a long-term relationship with a tenured English professor (Michael Sheen, in another one of his uncannily convincing embodiments of insufferable academics), a man who clearly takes her for granted. He’s dismissive and only vaguely affectionate towards her. It’s one of those movie relationships that’s obviously doomed from the get go. The story that follows involves Portia’s slow realization that the life she’s living is not the one that will make her happy.

Enter Paul Rudd, playing the principal of an experimental high school who invites her to visit their campus and give her usual spiel about applying for Princeton. He’s taken a special interest in a gifted student with a rocky transcript (Nat Wolff) and wants to make sure she notices and gives this underdog a chance. It goes against all the rules, but in the movie’s totally soft and unemphatic way, it forms a minor critique of the college admissions process as one that is, in some cases, designed to weed out the more unconventionally promising candidates. But that’s on the film’s thematic back burner, since what it’s really interested in is showing us that the admissions Portia most needs to make are to herself. It’s a low-key movie of self-discovery, personal growth, and slow evolution of relationship statuses. Admirably serious about its setting in academia, an unconventional setting and approach for Hollywood films of any kind, it’s a film that’s nonetheless so low-key that I was almost afraid that movie itself was going to fall asleep right before my very eyes.

That it doesn’t is a testament to the charms of the cast which, Fey and Rudd aside, features lovely small-scale character work from national treasures like Lily Tomlin (as Fey’s proudly liberal mother) and Wallace Shawn (as the head of the admissions department). Director Paul Weitz (working in a mode much closer to his About a Boy than his American Pie or, God forbid, Little Fockers) and screenwriter Karen Croner (adapting the novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz) keep things moving along cleanly and clearly with a gentle tug of narrative to push the emotions along in easy and relaxed ways. It’s sometimes funny, but in an off-hand way rather than through any conventional zingers. It’s sometimes romantic, but in such a wispy way that it almost registers after-the-fact. It’s sometimes pointed in explicit summoning of sociopolitical concerns and cultural studies, but only in the softest possible ways. I found myself smiling and soothed, if not exactly captivated and entertained.

A tidy embrace of open-endedness and a polite salute to mildly bad decisions snowballing into big life changes for the better, Admission ends up in a sweet, tender place as an appealingly minor work. Never once does the movie insist upon its own worth. Nor does it reach for anything more than its deliberate slightness. It’s merely a pleasant time with pleasant characters played pleasantly. It’s the kind of entertainment I’d imagine would play just as well, if not better, when viewed on cable TV while curled up on the couch some lazy wintry weekend when a combination of coziness and the common cold demand a just-complicated-enough piece of comfort.