Paranoid Park

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2007

Review: April 4, 2008

Director: Gus Van Sant

Starring: Gabe Nevins, Jake Miller, Daniel Liu, Taylor Momsen

Might render it beautifully lyrical or painfully boring.

THE SETUP:

Skate kid is involved in death.

DISCUSSION:

I liked Elephant, I’ve heard good thigs about Gerry, and I respect that Gus Van Sant is paving his own way with these recent series of extremely low-key movies, so off my friend and I went to Paranoid Park, which promised a modicum of excitement due to its murder mystery theme.

Well, that would be wrong—the excitement part, at least. We begin with our hero, Alex, writing “Paranoid Park” in his notebook, then hypnotic images of the disaffected skate youth of Portland, OR, including what Alex terms “throwaway kids,” skateboarding up and down the many hills and walls of the titular skate park. Then Alex is called out of class to go talk to a police investigator about a dead fellow who has recently been found in the rail yards. In here we start to realize that this story will be told non-chronologically. Alex says “I’m not good at creative writing,” although the real reason is obviously to structure the story so that the main event occurs at the end.

Which is fine, because the plot is not the point. Mostly it’s a portrait of Alex and his world and the people that fill it. Those people include his incongruous hot cheerleader girlfriend who is eager to have sex, his friend Jared, a fellow skater, this other girl with a smug attitude who struck me as fairly annoying but strikes others as refreshingly honest, and Alex’s mother and father. One notices that adults are usually presented out of focus or with their backs to the camera, showing their place as vague figures in Alex’s life. His father, whose arms are covered in tattoos, has gone to live with “his uncle.”

One day Jared suggests that they go to Paranoid Park after school, to which Alex says he doesn’t think he’s ready, causing Jared to reply that “no one is ever ready for Paranoid Park.” They go, and Alex returns by himself later, where he meets these kids who live at the park. One of them invites him to go over to the rail yards, where the fateful event takes place.

The tone of the movie as a whole, however, is to squash any excitement from the law-evasion or mystery aspect of the story, and focus on the sociology of the skate world and Alex’s internal struggle. Only the idea is that Alex is almost entirely opaque, which either notes that he is entirely without an inner life, or that a great many thoughts are raging within him that he just doesn’t have the capacity to express of even process. And the whole thing of the movie is YOU don’t know, either. You’re always on the outside. Alex, who looks like a slightly grown version of Danny from The Shining, looks blankly at ths and drives here and writes in his journal and drives there and hangs with his friends and reads the paper for news of the death, and all the while we just watch. Which might grow irritating if the entire point of the movie is that we can’t really know what’s happening [or not happening] in these kids minds.

Okay, point taken, but this approach can lead one to wonder if there’s actually anything going on in the movie, or if its all just meaningful to Van Sant. The review in the New York Press accused Van Sant of merely wanting to look at and hang out with those cute, cute skate boys [and there is this whole element of his recruiting some actors, including Alex, by browsing MySpace pages], and I’m afraid that one can’t entirely dismiss this viewpoint. The images here are so blank that YOU either project meaning and depth onto them and find it moving, or wait for the director to guide you toward the perspective he intends—and end up feeling like nothing is going on and these kids are just emotional voids. But the achievement and frustration of the movie are that it remains a fairly blank canvas for viewers to project upon.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

If you like. You will definitely live a life of comparable richness if you choose to skip it.