Paranoid Park

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

This is another fine film by Gus Van Sant which sadly seems to have overlooked by most cinemas and cinema-goers where I live. I attended one of three screenings at an almost-deserted local art-house cinema in Southampton. For me, however, this short, low-key film left a deep-impression.

The non-narrative structure of the film means that the action on screen cuts back and forth in time around a central incident in which Alex, played by Gabe Nevins, causes the death of a security guard on a train track in Portland, Oregon, where the film is set. This shocking event is unveiled, appropriately enough, in the middle of the film. From very early it is more or less obvious what trouble Alex is in, so there is little sense of mystery about the film's events. However the non-narrative sequencing does allow for questions to float to the surface before explanations and elaborations begin to crop up later in the film, allowing the viewer to make connections and draw some conclusions for themselves. I quite enjoy this approach to story-telling although it does seem to be increasingly common (see Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Memento, et al).

The cast, apparently consisting of local teenagers with little background in acting, turn in some fine performances, especially Gabe Nevins in the central role of Alex. Scenes in the film are interspersed with camcorder footage of teenagers skateboarding around Oregon, which is a novel touch and in keeping with the feel of Van Sant's films, which are realistic but more dreamlike than gritty.

A special mention should go to the soundtrack in Paranoid Park, which is one of the strongest features of this film. The music ranges from rock (the Revolts) through folk (Elliott Smith) to classical (Beethoven) and musique concrete (Robert Normandeau). My favourite use of music in the film is in the opening shots of skateboarders in the skate park (from which the film's title is taken). Warm electronic tones and burblings envelope a continuous slow-motion camera shot of skateboarders as they rove around the the curves and angles of the park and the effect is really quite magical. (Having said that, I think there are one too many slow-motion shots later in this film which seem somewhat suspicious when the running time is less than 90 minutes...)

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

"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.