Paranoid Park (Review)

My memories of Paranoid Park, the latest high school head-trip from Gus Van Sant (Last Days) are fuzzy at best. But rather than skip a review because I saw the movie months ago at the New York Film Festival, why not acknowledge that Van Sant's recent forays into art cinema sometimes feel fuzzy even as you're watching them. So discuss it I shall. Pardon the haze.

Gus Van Sant began his career making fringe films like Mala Noche (1985) and quickly began attracting name stars and wide acclaim for projects such as Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991) --both are must sees if you haven't had the pleasure. After the mainstream Oscar breakthrough that was Good Will Hunting (1997) it became harder to spot the auteur in him. Hunting, for its charms, could have been made by any number of people. And try drawing a line between Hunting and Psycho (1998) through Finding Forrester and when you end up in the desert in Gerry, I expect you will feel completely lost. But maybe Van Sant had to lose himself this way to find the auteur within again.

For all there potency, there's something amorphous about his recent series of art films from Gerry to Park, even when they're as formally controlled as, say, Elephant with that hazy roaming camera that seemed dreamily adrift until you realized it was moving with utter precision and purpose, circling back in time for second looks. Nothing in Paranoid Park, his latest peek at troubled youth, is on the level of that earlier picture, but it has its moments of hypnotic beauty.

The story, and there is one this time though Van Sant approaches it impressionistically, is about a skater boy who passes one fateful night with a little voyeurism at a serious skater hangout and then becomes involved in a gruesome death. Van Sant gives the story to you piecemeal and it comes out in small chunks like painful and half formed thoughts direct from the protagonist, Alex (Van Sant discovery Gabe Nevins), who doesn’t really want to tell the story in the first place. Van Sant, probably to his credit, prefers to keep his narrative within the inchoate headspace of this young boy, which makes the film alternately revelatory and dull.

Gabe Nevins has a great face for the camera and works well within Van Sant’s conceit but his lack of acting experience and the purposefully limited naturalism of the dialogue limits the poetry that the film has in mind. The central accident is filmed superbly and you’ll understand why it haunts this boy. Van Sant does pull off a couple of minor miracles within the miniaturist approach. The sound mix in particular is fascinating, all jarring stops and starts and a rough-hewn quality like a homemade mix tape. There’s a terrific shower sequence as well that will be inappropriately written off as voyeuristic (it’s not exploitive at all) but Van Sant maximizes its emotional power and even manages a great if unfunny joke. Alex stays in the shower forever –paralyzed by his terrible unfathomable night and perhaps he's working through the traditional “out damn spot” emotions that bloody actions will cause in fiction. The sneaky layered sound mix works in birds chirping which are also on the wallpaper behind the showering boy. As Alex sinks emotionally and physically into the shower, the framing and the sound suggested to me nothing so much as one of those cartoons where a stunned character’s head is circled by birds to illustrate dizziness. But it wasn’t a joke I laughed at so much as smiled about an hour later. I even wondered if I had imagined it.

But that’s my favorite part of Van Sant’s slow and dreamy filmmaking. Those long desert walks in Gerry and the endless hallways of Elephant and now the repetitive skating. The moviegoer will either fill in some of these empty spaces or tune out, exasperated if they don’t want to be truly inside the movie. Alex is a character who is both dazed and confused and you might be too while watching Paranoid Park. However one reacts to it, Gus Van Sant’s filmography continues to impress and surprise. One suspects or hopes that these odd and small films will eventually inform and elevate the next phase of the director’s long and varied career.