Gabe Nevins stars as a troubled teen in gay director Gus Van Sant's ‘Paranoid Park.’ (Photo courtesy of IFC)
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GREG MARZULLO
Friday, March 21, 2008
Set amongst the seemingly freewheeling world of young skater kids, gay director Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” becomes a meditation on coming-of-age and the shattering of youthful illusions.
Young Alex (a Raphaelite, cherubic-faced Gabe Nevins) unfurls his story through the pages of what turns out to be a letter. Read as any awkward, disaffected teen would read his work out loud, he tells the audience of Paranoid Park, the hard-core skating park of Portland. This is where all the real skate kids go, the ones whose parents have abandoned them, the homeless kids, the outcasts from all social cliques except this one last stop for all misfits.
Alex went to Paranoid Park with his friend Jared (Jake Miller), and after that things start spiraling out of control. Alex is called down to the principal’s office by a police detective (Daniel Liu) who’s doing some work on a case involving a railroad security guard whose torso was severed after being run down by a train.
Not just a crappy misfortune, there’s a suggestion that someone clocked the old guy in the head with a skateboard before the mystery killer hurled the weapon into the river. Alex spends the rest of the film teasing out the conclusion, piece by piece, revealing the reasoning behind seemingly random incidents shown during the film’s initial scenes.
Innocent phone calls and teen ennui take on deeper meanings as the details of Alex’s weekend plans come to light and as he gets drawn deeper into a damning web of evidence.
VAN SANT WROTE the screenplay based on a book by Blake Nelson, and the script, which is purposefully disjointed, never falls apart into utter confusion, although there’s enough mystery to keep the film moving at a strong clip despite the director’s luxuriating in slow visual sequences.
While some might find these long segments tedious, they actually serve to amp up the emotional drama surrounding Alex. After a long night of life-changing lunacy, the young boy stands in the shower, water pulsing over his face with delayed timing as the blackness of night slowly turns to dawn and brightest day. Alex still stands there, hands covering his face, and the water fails to cleanse his internal world from dark events that could possibly ruin his life forever.
Van Sant beautifully highlights those life-altering moments and the sense of time that almost comes to a halt as we weigh our limited options.
The director also chose a curious scoring to the film, selecting classical pieces of music blended with heavy metal and even moments from the great film composer Nina Rota’s score for Frederic Fellini’s “Roma.” Perhaps he meant this as a commentary on the dark underbelly of places that were once the hope of the world — Rome in the ancient and Portland among the remnants of the make-love-not-war sect. Still, at times the musical background comes off as either pretentious or downright exasperating, an elusive key into director’s choices that could just be filler.
Van Sant seems to specialize in films about younger men trying to untie Gordian knots, whether that’s of the racial variety (“Finding Forrester”), the sexually ambiguous variety (“My Own Private Idaho”) or the emotional landscape (“Good Will Hunting”), and in many ways “Paranoid Park” fits in beautifully with those career-long themes.
But it’s the skill of the filming technique, the edgy approach that makes the movie a remarkable reminder of Van Sant’s power as a grittier filmmaker that isn’t always as apparent in slicker studio productions. And this more plainspoken approach ultimately serves his stories better, for what better recorder of the lost modern male’s dreams of freedom than a shaky, handheld video capturing grainy, nostalgic and ultimately useless memories.
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