dir: Gus Van Sant
2008
Gus Van Sant really likes them teenaged boys. No, I=92m not going for
the obvious gag here, I mean that there really is something he seems
to love in terms of capturing time, trying to preserve this brief
moment in their lives between the adolescent and adult worlds.
Paranoid Park has a really simple story fractured into pieces and told
in a manner whose purpose seems to be less the telling of a story and
more capturing how Alex, our main character, feels about stuff. That
sounds like some deep ****, doesn=92t it.
There is something enjoyable about watching a flick about a teenage
kid that isn=92t about popularity, that isn=92t about getting laid, it=92s
not about the prom and it=92s not about some stupid bet usually
involving sleeping with one particular girl until the protagonist
realises that the girl who truly loves him was the slightly tomboyish
but still totally feminine best friend who was alongside all etc etc.
In terms of other flicks Van Sant has made, it=92s also refre****ng to
watch him make a film about teenagers that isn=92t about a Columbine-
style massacre, about two morons wandering lost in the desert or the
last days of a drug-addled rock star.
As for his decision to use non-professional actors, as in, people
recruited from a MySpace page, it pays off here. Any awkwardness on
the part of teenagers playing teenagers can be put down to the fact
that, being teenagers, they=92re generally awkward. It doesn=92t wreck the
believability of it. But the guy playing Alex (Gabe Nevins) gives a
decent performance, mostly because it=92s completely underplayed. He
walks around mostly looking like your average blank, easily bored
teenager.
And we watch him do a fair amount of walking, eating, reading and a
bit of skating.
Paranoid Park is an illegal skatepark created by some hardcore skaters
under an overpass that exists as a kind of Shangri-La for the local
skatekids like Alex. When he and his equally feckless friend Jared
(Jake Miller) work up the courage to finally go there and skate, they
get a taste of the outlaw life.
For Alex the park represents something more than just a place to
skate, but, as we see from the slivers of past and present that fade
in and out, the place is about to symbolise even more for Alex.
The death of a security guard near the park kicks off a homicide
investigation, and Alex himself through the writing of a journal, or,
more accurately, a confessional letter, seems to know what happened on
some fateful night.
Time ****fts forward and backward, but for once I feel like there=92s a
payoff to it all. It is better integrated in terms of telling the
story, and works more effectively in terms of helping to tell the
story rather than hindering it, compared to Van Sant=92s other non-
linear monstrosities like Elephant and Last Days.
The cinematography by renowned Australian drunk Christopher Doyle and
some other person is quite beautiful, even when it consists of
languid, grainy footage of skaters doing their skater thing. It adds
to that almost melancholy approach to capturing the lives of young
people, which is sometimes a way of mourning for the loss of childhood
innocence. The music compliments the proceedings, adding to the
nervous, frightened, horrified manner in which life can impact on a
hapless teenage boy.
The use of songs by Eliot Smith, I have to say, whilst beautiful and
plaintive, is even sadder to hear these days since the poor bastard=92s
suicide. There are some other sweet atmospheric instrumental pieces,
as well as the almost incongruous use of music from some of Fellini's
films, which distracted me only because I recognise Nino Rota=92s stuff,
and I thought it was weird to use it here. Generally music is well-
used to run in parallel with what occurs onscreen, and in some
instances to deliberately overwhelm it, preventing us from hearing
dialogue we don=92t need (or want) to hear.
Even though the flicks are completely different, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT,
let me just emphasise that, it did remind me of Mysterious Skin, in
terms of the evocative, simple imagery and the almost languid,
beautiful sorrow imbued in almost every scene. But thankfully there
was none of the hideously ugly kiddie-fiddler stuff.
For many of us, at least those of us that made it out of our teenage
years alive, it was a time fraught with hormones and stupidity.
Depending on how unlucky or how stupid you were, there were these
moments where something happened when you did something without
thinking about it, then there was the horrible realisation that what
occurred, which you never really put that much thought into, was real,
and could not be undone. Then the visual image of what you wrought in
your unthinkingness becomes engraved upon the valleys and whorls of
your grey matter, forevermore.
Alex may or may not have had one of these moments, where an action
taken, unplanned and completely unintended, leads to a terrible
result. An absolutely horrific result. He reacts in believable ways,
like we might expect a teenage boy to react, but we also know that he
is not essentially a bad person. Scratch that: if you want to be
cynical about it, we get no indications in the movie as told that Alex
is a sociopath. We believe, for all intents and purposes, that he
knows the difference between right and wrong, and that the events of
some fateful night weigh heavily upon him.
This is not post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Maybe it=92s guilt, maybe
it=92s fear of being found out, perhaps a combination of all of them. If
this were an after-school special, he=92d end up =93acting out=94 from
guilt, he=92s start drinking, doing drugs, having terrible unprotected
*** and dying of AIDS.
But this isn=92t an after-school special. There=92s nothing to preach
about, and the film=92s not coming from the point of view that there=92s
anything new we have to learn from the experience of school-age kids
****ing things up.
They have their world, and a limited armamentarium of vocabulary and
emotional awareness with which to describe it. So the filmmaker=92s
objective, in this instance, is more about finding the best way to
convey to us how it feels for Alex, rather than what it all means.
There=92s no point having Alex tell us through telling some other
character everything that he=92s going through using the vocabulary and
phrases of someone much older, which is what would be needed to make
it interesting or insightful to us. But who really wants that? Some
snot-nosed kid talking like he=92s reclining on Oprah=92s couch? Does that
sound interesting to you?
No, I=92ll take Van Sant=92s impressionist, dreamy take on Blake
Nelson=92s
novel. It=92s a beautiful film, and I=92m glad I got to see it. Even if
it=92s not that deep, it did evoke some strong feelings in me, and that
is all I ask of cinema: If nothing else, make me feel something apart
from contempt and boredom, that=92s all a man can ask for.
Sandro - 7 security guards cut in half and dragging their intestine-
strewing torsos across a train yard out of 10
--
=93You=92d rather sit here pretending to read about S****ts in the Metro
section of the newspaper?=94 =96 Paranoid Park.
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