The Reel Critic

Author: Jason Gutierrez

MOVIE: Paranoid Park
DIRECTOR: Gus Van Sant
STARRING: Gabe Nevins, Taylor Momsen and Daniel Liu

This first paragraph is going to be a bit pretentious, but bear with me. Movie titles are an important venue from which audiences can glean information about a film; the story, a genre, or simply a mood can be pulled out of the title. It helps audiences know what they're getting into. Every now and then, however, a film comes along whose title says more about the film's themes than its plot; a title that retroactively seems to tell the audience more about the film than reading a dozen reviews. Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" is just such a title, at once saying nothing about the film, but also evoking the youthful isolation, guilt and paranoia that are the film's core themes. It's a subtle feature of the film, but then again the strongest features of "Paranoid Park" are its amazing subtlety and the quiet grace with which it tries to capture the interior of the characters that populate its setting.

"Paranoid Park" tells the story of Alex (Gabe Nevins, who gives a fantastic performance), a young skateboarder who gravitates toward the "throw-away kids" that hang out at the local skate park from whose name the film's title is derived. Hanging out there one night, he is invited by an elder statesman (of sorts) to hop a boxcar to grab some beer. It is here that Alex has an encounter with a railroad security guard which sets the events of the film in motion.

I'm relaying this narrative information as if it is temporally sequential. It isn't. Alex's culpability in the death of the security guard is hopelessly ambiguous. I've seen the film twice and I'm still not sure whether he was responsible or not. To a fairly significant degree, though, his guilt or innocence is unimportant; what is important here, as in Van Sant's "Elephant," is how young people deal with death and other societal pressures. If that sounds dismissive, I don't mean it to, because these themes fit Van Sant like a glove and play to his strengths as a director.

Gus Van Sant is a director whose heart has always been in formal experimentation and narrative complexities. His interest is less in realism and more in the (occasionally) hallucinatory realm of a character's psyche, and that side of Van Sant's personality is on full display here, perhaps more so than in any of his films since "My Own Private Idaho." He mixes mediums, shooting the preponderance of the film on 35 mm, but splicing in skateboard footage that was shot on Super-8 film. These bits of spliced-in skateboard footage provide the most interesting formal experiment in the film, as they appear to be placed in the film for no rhyme or reason. They simply exist, coming to the surface as if they are part of the unconsciousness inherent in all members of the skateboarding subculture that Van Sant captures so well.

This desire to capture the interior of his characters provides Van Sant with an opportunity for further experimentation, using sound design, soundscapes and source music (which runs the gamut from Beethoven to Nino Rota to Elliott Smith) as an opportunity to try to ensnare the guilt and/or disaffection of Alex and his friends. The sound design, combined with Van Sant's always interesting imagery, creates a dream-like atmosphere that reaches Lynch-ian proportions. When we are finally shown the encounter with the railroad security guard, it is one of the most genuinely shocking moments I've seen in quite some time, but it is also oddly foreign, as if the audience is allowed to drift through this dream world for most of the film. When confronted with something as grisly as the security guard's death it feels less like narrative information being provided to the audience and more like one more moment spent in Alex's jumbled and guilt-ridden unconscious.

Van Sant provided moviegoing audiences with two films in 2008. The first was this under-recognized gem; the other was the overblown and overrated "Milk." Where "Paranoid Park" is subtly affecting, "Milk" telegraphs its emotional peaks and valleys. Where "Paranoid Park" focuses on capturing the interior of its protagonist, "Milk" has no time or interest in exploring Harvey Milk beyond reducing him to his achievements. In a way the aims of the two films are so different that comparing them does neither justice, but they are both the works of the same filmmaker and worlds apart. One is a fantastic film of youthful alienation that eschews Hollywood formula in favor of something different. The other is mechanical mediocrity. It's a bummer most people saw the other. Luckily, though, "Paranoid Park" is on DVD in the library. Check it out, because it deserves more than to simply be thought of as an exercise in formal experimentation. It ranks among the best work of a fantastic director.