April of 2008 - RAG Magazine

Paranoid Park
By Sam Osborn (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 yearold’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.