Paranoid Park

Paranoid Park (2007) ****

Another Van Sant gem. Discovering Bela Tarr has really redefined his career, and brought out a new artistic direction in him. I've really been enjoying his new directions, and have been a great admirer of Elephant in particular. Van Sant here has crafted a very interesting film, one that at the end had to make me think for a minute: wait? he's robbed us of the end of the story - only to snap back again seconds later to think: you crafty swine...

Yes, the security guard narrative essentially is a macguffen. Paranoid Park transcends its thematic plot to discover deeper and far more rewarding truths. The film is above all about communication, or the lack thereof, or learning how to of. The story follows Alex, a young skater who is involved in the accidental but brutal death of a security guard in a train yard nearby the infamous Paranoid Park. The narrative style jumps around in time, tracing a number of days in the life of our young skater. He has issues with his parents: they're divorcing; he feels they don't' care about him. He has issues with his girlfriend: she pushes him to have sex, and he does not because he wants to but because he can't communicate how he feels to her. And to push things over the top, he has the burden of being involved in a man's death, and a suspicious but jovial police officer questioning him. Sounds like pretty standard stuff, but its the execution that makes it work. Alex narrates the film as he writes out his story. We come to find in the last act that he's been persuaded by a kindly and politically interested girl, who recognizes when no one else does that he's harbouring some serious baggage. This she tells him is the key to his emancipation. Once he writes he had can simply burn it - its the telling of the story that counts, not the audience. Van Sant employs his newfound quiet and laboured pacing to highlight the anomic alienation of Alex from his slacker and otherwise inept friends (who laugh at the photos of the mutilated man's body), his girlfriend, and most of all his parents. He uses some excellent and totally unexpected music for a skater film, and structures this as the most refined film featuring skate boarding one could imagine. He also uses some clever camera and editing tricks, such as a number of sequences where the soundtrack plays at normal speed against a shot that is slowed down, creating a dreamy and hallucinatory effect. It was otherwise nice to see some old School Fellini film music thrown in their. Parents were a big theme in Elephant, and I think an even bigger theme here. Van Sant uses a simple but ingeniously clever camera trick to highlight the distance between Alex and his parents - he keeps their faces either offscreen of out of focus, save for one important moment. The affect created is such that when we finally see the face come into focus, the words said become all the more poignant and truly touching

I was fortunate enough to attend a cast and crew screening of Gus Van Sant's latest film, Paranoid Park. Having missed Last Days, Gerry, and seeing only bits and pieces of Elephant, I didn't really know what to expect as he sheepishly greeted the crowd, said his thank you's, and let the film roll. With all the criticism, both for and against these recent films, I prepared myself for meaningless long shots of people walking, eating, and various other moments that would quickly find their way to most editor's cutting room floors. Would I be held hostage by a director too much in love with his own shots, or witness the work of a director who could, at this point in his career, easily coast -- yet continues to redefine himself? Thankfully, it was the latter.

Paranoid Park is easily one of my favorite films of the year, second only to First Snow. Both share the same kind of slow, dreamy reverie I think mainstream audiences are put off by. Both are threaded by haunting scores that are inseparable from the film as a whole. The film feels like music on its own.

Park's story is about the death of a security guard in Portland's industrial district, very close to an infamous skate park named Paranoid Park. The film was shot entirely in Portland Oregon. Much like Van Sant's, Drug Store Cowboy, the director treats the various locales in Portland as a second character, showcasing the unique flavor of the city without coming across as a film commissioned by the Oregon tourist board.

The young lead in the film, Gabe Nevins, in what is perhaps his debut film role, has the uneasy task of carrying the film. He plays Alex, a shy skater type who has little interest in his parents, school, or his pretty girlfriend. His performance is commendable. In a role that could have come across as the typical Skater Boy we've all seen 100 times before, he comes off naturally, as a nervous boy who's uncomfortable in his own skin; A boy gripped by an internal struggle too personal to share with anyone. The film is ultimately about this struggle. His narration might strike many viewers as stoic and forced. I would have to disagree. I saw it as the voice of a boy nervously scribbling away at his journal — mistakes and all. The entire film has that raw type of quality.

While pleased with Nevins' performance, I can't say the same for two of the young female actresses in the film. Taylor Momsen, who plays Alex's girlfriend is awful. In contrast to Nevins' natural performance, Momsen comes off like a pretty teenager who's nervous about being watched. I've seen better acting at middle school dance recitals. In a long scene shared by the two, we hear nothing but music, this seemed less like an artistic decision and more like a creative way to tune out her distracting acting. Lauren McKinney, as Alex's friend, shows us an equally wooden performance.

The most impressive quality of Paranoid Park is the gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Kathy Li. There is a rich, warm — almost vintage quality to the film. Mixing what looked like various stocks of Super 8, digital video, and 35 MM film, each location is bathed in its own outward charm. In a scene where Alex sits on the beach, the aperture flicks forward and backwards, letting light jerk around the lens. It fits the mood of the scene perfectly, like orchestral scratches on an old LP.

Overall, Paranoid Park is like a gorgeous and melancholy folk song. With my head still swirling from summer block busters like Transformers and Harry Potter, it was refreshing to watch a film with breathing room. Whether the many dreamlike shots are the result of a director (who edits his own film) unwilling to cut away from his favorite shots, or of an orchestrated effort to thread the film like a song and let the narrative drift in and out, I am in love with his effort and look forward to dreaming with him more.

Yours in Service, Robert Plastorm

Gus Van Sant continues his trend of making dreamy, artsy mood-pieces with Paranoid Park, a film about a skateboarding teen who accidentally causes the death of a security guard. In some ways, it almost feels like a continuation of Elephant, where kids are shot walking through school hallways in slow motion (here photographed by the legendary Christopher Doyle), and their actions and reactions are observed quietly. No, no literal shooting in those hallways this time, thank God, just the thick sense of guilt weighing down on young Alex (Gabe Nevins). From what I had read about this film, I had gathered that it was about a disaffected teenager who doesn't really care about the death he caused (and, reading some words written over Paranoid Park, it seems that that is a common interpretation, which I think is entirely incorrect). Van Sant thankfully isn't going the "don't teenagers suck?" route that many filmmakers would probably go. Alex is depicted as a boy wounded, and who understands what he has wrought. Van Sant perfectly captures that high school feeling of being lost in your own life, visualized in gorgeous footage of skateboarders dreamily gliding up ramps and walls. The chronology is disassembled, but not quite in the same, Béla Tarr-inspired way as it was in the director's previous two films. Disassembled chronology is becoming quite a cliché nowadays, but a director like Van Sant knows how to use it, how it adds to the mood and meaning of the picture.

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.