Paranoid Park

After turning his back on the mainstream 6 years ago with his striking yet spurned two-man tale, Gerry, acclaimed writer/director Gus Van Sant delivers once more in refined style with his own eccentric yet poignant spin on the teen' movie genre.

Adapted from Blake Nelson's best selling novel and shot masterfully in Van Sant's hometown of Portland, Paranoid Park hinges on an act of acute violence. Alex (Gabe Nevins) is a confused schoolboy skater whose life hits the bricks following his role in the death of a local security guard. The film itself, then, is largely told from Alex's perspective as he goes back and forth in his mind and notebook in an attempt to vindicate his tainted conscious and make sense of why and how things happened the way they did.

With the chronology of the omniscient narrative skewed and certain scenes misleading, Paranoid Park establishes a near perfect balance between form and content. The naivety and confusion stirring behind Nevins' infantile eyes are both complimented and mirrored by the structure of the plot. In his feature debut, Nevins gives a modest performance of troubled teen' in whom thoughts of; family, divorce, sex, skating, school and murder suffer a succession of high-speed collisions. At the age of just 15, Nevins' not only performs with a quality beyond his tender years and experience, but provides a leading performance that is as convincing as it is impressive.

As for Van Sant, his tight film-making skills are exhibited throughout in what has to be considered as an experimental picture wherein an uncanny blend of hand-held, slow-mo' scenic inter-cuts, out-of-sync shots and mellow off-screen alternative music carve a moody yet nonchalant atmosphere that at times suggests that this is an independent crime-mystery drama, at others: a tale of boy becomes man. Whatever it is, it brings to mind the likes of Memento and Brick. Hence, it is simply brilliant. Mystifying, moving and quite majestic. Paranoid Park is one of this year's most haunting and interesting features that ranks amidst Van Sant's finest work to date. Good Will Hunting? Not quite. But for such a question to prompt a pause for thought says a lot. See this.

This reminded me very much of ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU. Languid story about youth culture with a tragic turn of events, with distinctive use of music and camera technique. It's a tough film to classify, not quite a character study, not much of a thriller, more of a mood piece. I was a little perplexed at what Van Sant was aiming for (and particularly confused by the repeated snippets of score from JULIET OF THE SPIRITS) but it resonates and does a pretty good job of sucking you into its rhythms and offbeat structure. There are a few character moments that don't quite ring true, but this may be more a function of the non-professional cast than any fault of the screenplay. Shot beautifully by Chris Doyle on location here in Van Sant's hometown of Portland, it's always a kick to see familiar places (and faces... Ken Boddie!). It's not a DRUGSTORE COWBOY or a GERRY, but I liked it more than a lot of other Van Sants I've tried.

Gus Van Sant's ongoing exploration of the lot of disaffected teens continues with this slow, dreamlike study of a typical teenager (newcomer Gabe Nevins) whose life is thrown into emotional turmoil when he accidentally kills a security guard.

This film has a number of strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps its biggest strength is the commendable ordinariness of its teens; they could be your kids, your brother or sister, your friends, you; their every thought and action isn't predetermined by an overpowering desire to get laid, they're not prone to playing pranks on one another or their teachers, and they're not getting drunk or taking drugs at every opportunity. They have pointless conversations that go nowhere, the aspects of the world they consider unimportant are instinctively exiled to the edges of their consciousness and they are not yet infected with the overbearing urge to get on in life. Alex, the film's focal point, wanders aimlessly through his life, the impact of his accidental killing of a security guard barely monitoring on his blank features.

The film also wanders, also apparently aimlessly for much of its brief running time. Van Sant employs a non-linear chronology to tell his tale, a device that has very quickly become over-used and that, in most cases, adds little or nothing to the impact of the fractured story it describes. Here, scenes that don't make a lot of sense the first time we see them are replayed later on once the chronological gaps have been filled. It's like pieces of a jigsaw falling into place – but it also smells suspiciously of a director with not much material on his hands using every trick he can think of to elongate material that doesn't really add up to more than 45 minutes screen time. In addition to the same scenes playing twice, Van Sant also treats us to long (and frequent) slow motion sequences of nothing in particular: school-kids walking through their school's corridors, Alex's friend driving his car, kids at the eponymous skateboard park showing their stuff in grainy 8mm. It all adds a dreamy, detached feel to things that pulls you in with its mesmerising repetition in the same way that the fluent, alert sections of the mind might yield to some particularly strong grass, only without dulling the senses.

The isolation of all youth – from whatever generation – is succinctly captured in Alex's plight, the extremity of his situation perversely succeeding in pinpointing teen angst rather than generalising it. I can't really decide whether Nevins is terrific or just terrifically bad. His face is an impenetrable mask, almost permanently blank, and his lines are delivered in a monotone that captures the inflections (or lack of) of youth. All this might have been what he was told to do, or might just be the best he can muster in terms of acting ability. Either way, his character provokes responses that range from sympathy to exasperation in the viewer, which ultimately leave you wishing you could step inside the story to bang a few heads together and get things moving.

Fans of Van Sant will probably love this film, but very few neutral viewers will be converted to his style of movie-making.

Gus Van Sant's latest films have been some of the most idiosyncratic not just of his career but of independent film in America since 2000. He's jumped ship, momentarily, from the Hollywood machine (To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) and made films like Gerry, Elephant and Last Days as sort of poetic essays on film (yes, very pretentious, but they are poetic at least). His latest, Paranoid Park, at least could be called as something more of a story-driven narrative than any of the others, but it's still with a lyrical beat, driven by a mix-and-match of 8mm skateboarding footage and the malaise of a teen caught in that very recognizable, almost atypical state of mind at that age. Only here, it's probably more of a quiet, detached malaise that has within it a soul that is being sort of killed away piece by piece by the secret he holds.

The teen is Alex (first timer Gabe Nevins), who was mostly responsible for the (very) grisly death of a security guard while he and a not-quite acquaintance from Paranoid Park's skating scene were riding carelessly along a slow-moving train. He shut it out of his mind, or tried to, until a police officer examining the case brought in photos of the deceased in a Q & A with all of the skaters at high school. This, pretty much, is the bedrock of the story, but aside from this it's the 'something' that is the story. The rest of the film shows this kid in a state of peril, but not of the sort that makes us think this is an immediate existential crisis. He feigns interest in a girlfriend (ditzy Jennifer played by Taylor Momsen), hangs out with his skater friends like Jared (also first-timer Jake Miller), and writes in a journal with a narration that's a mix of detached Travis Bickle and, well, awkward teen.

What interested me was a mood I found Van Sant, intentionally or otherwise, was working with. I kept thinking back to a work like Camus's the Stranger, which had its 'hero' Mersault as a figure who wasn't exactly passionate and just a few heart beats above dead fish. There's something in this kids eyes, in his lack of reaction and in those long moments right after the train track scene as he is under the shower faucet in slow-motion. Actually, there's a lot of slow-motion, sometimes of walking, or ruminating, and as it builds with the narration and the mix of stark and experimental cinematography from the great Christopher Doyle (great at, you know, these kinds of art-house films), as part of Van Sant's method of character study.

Alex's inability to connect, with friends, parents, authority figures, even his own impulse to release his inner thoughts, however brief and to the point ("I'm not much of a creative writer," Alex admits), is what is meant to absorb the viewer into Paranoid Park. For Van Sant, no matter what the excesses of the light touches of music (mostly from Nino Rota and Elliot Smith), or the slow-motion skateboarding (which I could go either way on as a casual admirer of the sport), or the bits that seem to have not much to do with anything aside from following a character in the midst of some thought (i.e. Alex on an escalator), it works as a feat of art for expressing its character, in the relatively short running time, like no other filmmaker would. It's somewhat challenging, but one that's worth taking for glimpses into a state of mind akin to the sobering existential and, more startling, the lack-of-coming-of-age to the character. 8.5/10

"Paranoid Park" is about what is going on in the head of a teenage boy after he has experienced a shattering trauma. He is dislocated and remote and 'not all there', or is he just in shock? It really is up to the audience to decide for themselves, because in an experimental movie like this one, no easy answers are forthcoming.

In general I quite like Gus Van Sant's films, but be aware that you need to judge each of his films on their own merits. This is hardly the Gus Van Sant of Hollywoodian mild indie fare like "To Die For", "Psycho", "Good Will Hunting" or "Finding Forrester". Stylistically "Paranoid Park" is a close cousin to his later "Elephant". Low key, quiet, internalised, sometimes naturalistic, but often dreamy, and with a chronologically fractured time line. None of the actors seemed to be acting at all. Brilliant casting or brilliant acting? I am unsure.

Not for everybody.