Paranoid Park Review
by [email protected] (sdo230 AT gmail DOT com)March 10th, 2008
Paranoid Park
reviewed by Sam Osborn of www.TheMovieMammal.com
The tangle of story that's unraveled in Paranoid Park is as wandering, lush, and explicit as any teenaged diary entry. Which is just as well, since the film is a recollection of a sixteen year-old's painful memory of murder as transcribed in his confessional letter to a friend.
As Alex--the film's narrator and lead character--warns us at the beginning, what we are about to see is not in order. He didn't do so well in Creative Writing class. But sitting at his bedroom desk or at the isolated bench near a Portland lake, Alex will recount his story to us in its entirety. Scenes will be repeated, dialogue crossed and criss-crossed, stories changed, and revelations put on hold. This is the way Paranoid Park unfolds. It is evasive and uncompromising, expansive and tangential. It is teenaged. But only in this way is it truthful.
Back in high school, the clearest definition for the word "apathetic" would not have been copied out of a Webster or Roget's. "Skater Group" would have done the trick just fine. It is the national banner for this disconnected community of purposeful misfits. To avoid emotional reactions from others, they choose not react emotionally themselves. It's an ingenious method for moving on from whatever familial, social, or personal crimes they've been victim to. Paranoid Park, more than anything else, is an effort by Alex to sustain his trademark skater kid's apathy during this emotional (and criminal) crisis. He has parents--separated and living apart--to worry about. He has a cheerleader girlfriend desperately seeking to lose her virginity. And he has friends and teachers and cops wondering where he's been these last few days. For a sixteen year-old, the death of railroad security guard has never meant so much.
Writer-Director Gus Van Sant makes it his duty to capture the moments when this apathetic barrier is shorn away. Often they are held in the seconds after a scene has ended, when Mr. Van Sant keeps his camera rolling. Or they're dug up when the right song is played, ranging from a lulling strum to a fanciful dance number to an orchestral score played backwards. Sometimes the moment is caught like a firefly in a jar, like when Van Sant opens and closes the camera's aperture, exposing an image in multiple lights and causing the image to grow into a meditation.
But at other times, the moments that compound into this strange and gruesomely enticing film, are those between the teenagers just killing time. The actors are all actual students, few of them having any previous acting experience. This casting decision sometimes wears thin, as a couple of the peripheral characters try extra-hard to remember their lines and not look into camera. But Alex, played by Gabe Nevins, finds a natural rhythm to his lines, convincing us of his perpetual boredom/secret interest in the world. When he reads his confessional letter in narration throughout the film, he reads it as though it were a school paper read out loud in front of his class. He stumbles on the lines, delivering them as a nervous, shaky reader would. He makes them into a report and not into a storyline, reminding us that this is not a movie, but that this is his memory.
Van Sant is an old hand at such realism. His previous two films-- Elephant and Last Days--were fictional recreations of real-to-life events: the Columbine school shooting and the Kurt Cobain tragedy. He's fallen from the mainstream since he made Good Will Hunting (and, less fortunately, the Psycho remake) now known for efforts of realism that test our patience and entertain our boredom. Elephant and Last Days lulled its audiences into a long, stark reality so that its third- act punch-line could reach the appropriate pitch in shock-factor. Thankfully, Mr. Van Sant has modified this formula for Paranoid Park. It's reminiscent of a teenage anthem. Not a love ballad, like Jon Poll intended with Charlie Bartlett, or an indie acoustic verse like Juno. But more like the cinematic representation of an Elliot Smith jam; where the world is lonely and criminal, but it is also where we live and where we must learn to move on.
www.TheMovieMammal.com
Paranoid Park: Written and Directed by Gus Van Sant. Adapted from a novel by Blake Nelson. Starring Gabe Nevins. MPAA Classification: R for disturbing images, language, and sexual content.
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