PARANOID
PARK
by Chris Dashiell
After
proving that he could direct successful Hollywood movies, Gus Van Sant
has made an artistic U-turn, crafting a series of uncompromising avant-garde
films. It’s a career path almost without parallel in cinematic
history, and he continues to follow it resolutely. The latest off-beat
example is called Paranoid Park.
Adapted from a Blake Nelson “young adult” novel, the story
concerns a Portland, Oregon high school student named Alex. His parents
are getting a divorce, he’s apathetic about the girl he’s
going steady with, and in fact the only thing he seems passionate about
is skateboarding. A friend gets him interested in visiting a skating
area nicknamed Paranoid Park and frequented by older, more experienced
skateboarders. One night, an older guy invites him to hop a train for
kicks at the nearby railway yard, but this bit of thrill-seeking ends
up getting Alex involved in the death of a railroad security guard.
The police are investigating it as a possible murder, and the teenager
struggles with telling someone, asking for help, or just keeping silent.
The
story is simple enough, but Van Sant long ago became tired with the
usual "one thing after another" approach to film narrative.
Here the events are shown out of sequence, depending on what Alex is
ready to reveal—he is writing about what happened, for reasons
that are only revealed late in the film. In the meantime, the picture
focuses on the strangeness, fear and beauty of the moments between events
as reflected in a young person’s disconnected sense of himself.
To that end we have the moody, dreamlike visuals of cinematographer
Christopher Doyle, with varying film stocks, angles and focuses; and
an editing style that favors a gliding contemplative view of people
walking away from or towards the camera, sometimes in slow-motion.
A
key element is the compelling sound design of Leslie Shatz, mixing rock,
rap, folk music, and classical in a constantly shifting sound brew that
lends the film an almost hermetic sense of interior observation. The
effect is alternately grave and ironic—an example of the latter
is the use of Nino Rota’s music from Juliet of the Spirits
playing over a scene between Alex and his shallow girlfriend in which
we see their lips moving without hearing the words. Rarely has adolescence
between treated so matter-of-factly, without either condescension or
explicit identification. Alex’s loneliness is just the way things
are for him, so this fact comes across as a part of the atmosphere,
only rarely tinged with pathos.
All the young nonprofessional actors were recruited from MySpace, and
the behavior is naturalistic to a fault. Alex is played by Gabe Nevins,
whose mixture of good looks and withdrawn affect makes him a near perfect
object of fascination, while playing someone who is a complete enigma
to himself.
The film’s visual strategies are meant to evoke thoughts and emotional
states on a subliminal level. A prime example is an extended scene with
Alex in the shower, where his head, dripping wet, morphs into a sort
of abstract pulsating design, accompanied by Shatz’s eerie soundscape.
The subjective meaning of the scene, however, only becomes clear through
later actions. The film’s meandering, poetic style always refers
back to itself like an endless loop.
Although this
is a more accessible work than Elephant
or Last
Days—Van Sant’s last two films—the
unprepared viewer may still be surprised by its deliberate avoidance
of conventional arc, its focus on the quiet, free-floating nature of
inner space, from which the events of the story are glimpsed as if through
a thin gauze of fear and hesitation. All this, of course, is precisely
the point—the psychology involved in Alex’s dilemma, for
all its intrinsic interest, needs no explanation, and Van Sant takes
us instead into a simulation of the deeper experience. It’s a
weird, beautiful movie, and very sad, in the way only rigorous truthfulness
can be.
©2008 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
