The Drifter
Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park
Is Gus Van Sant a great filmmaker? Most of the time, is he even a good one? Or is he something else—a gentle trickster whose experiments and digs at mainstream filmmaking are celebrated because they’re more well-timed than genuinely innovative? Obsessed as it is with basking in the light and darkness of youth culture, Paranoid Park, Van Sant’s new film, answers such cranky, legacy and history questions with a dim, sun-dappled stare. In Van Sant’s world, spacey pontification is all.
His new film is so distracted by its own showboating sound-image recombinations that it hardly seems interested in its hero, Alex (Gabe Nevins), a Portland teenager connected to the accidental death of a railroad yard security officer. Although Paranoid Park does little but flutter its stoned eyelids at the world for 85 minutes, it nonetheless confirms its maker’s status as a connoisseur of sensations and privileged moments who would rather flare his lens while shooting into the sun than tell a complete story.
Telling a story isn’t everything, though, and Van Sant’s been eschewing film narrative in the three features he’s made since 2000’s Finding Forrester. In its spacey slow-motion glides around town and its believable, naturalistic young-slacker cast, Paranoid Park looks and feels a lot like the director’s two previous melancholy headscapes: 2003’s Elephant and 2005’s Last Days, which were inspired by the Columbine shooting and the suicide of Kurt Cobain, respectively. Both films were leisurely, quasi-mystical contemplations of fragile human beings who discovered that their environments were not only strange but also secretly hostile.
As capital-A Avant-Garde as they were, Van Sant’s long takes, when combined with an impressionistic, subjective tinkering with sound and music, were healthy alternatives to the spastic editing rhythms of most commercial American fare. Yet behind Paranoid Park’s mischievous, free-associational soundscape and jagged, achronological storyline, Van Sant reveals a clinical distance towards his characters that drifts into bewilderment if not outright condescension.
As Alex, Nevins is flat and disaffected, and here Van Sant toys with the sanctity of the voiceover narration; notably, Alex has trouble reading his own written explanation of the film’s events during the voiceover segments. He remains unreadable after a tragic accident at the rail yard, and he keeps still and quiet during an interview with Detective Liu, an avuncular policeman who can’t break past Alex’s inarticulate mumblings. Alex’s friend Macy (Lauren McKinney) is a more penetrating sleuth than Detective Liu is; this pimple-potted Porfiry Petrovich gently needles Alex, regarding him with a knowing stare that contrasts Liu’s inability to connect with the kid. Adolescence is off-limits to adults, even when sudden death ends it prematurely.
Fans of the great Christopher Doyle, one of the two cinematographers (along with Kathy Li) who worked on the film, will be disappointed. The images don’t approach the high standard Doyle set while working with Wong Kar-Wai in pictures like 1994’s Chungking Express, 1997’s Happy Together and especially 2000’s In The Mood For Love. Strangely, Paranoid Park’s few visual delights are more overwhelming than beautiful. During one notable long take of Alex standing in the shower, the dissociated roar of sound and the stylized imagery meets, bends and blends, as Alex’s hair drips like stalactites while the panicked sounds of birds (matching the wallpaper above the shower) grow louder and louder.
Capturing such physical moments is one of Van Sant’s great strengths. An overlooked constant in many of his films is his unusually inventive and tactile staging of sex scenes, which often restrict the onscreen titillation and point of view to one of the participant’s faces. His great 1991 film My Own Private Idaho memorably concentrated on River Phoenix’s expression as a blow job woke him from a narcoleptic reverie; the same film presented a series of romantic still-photograph tableaux in an attempt to situate male desire within a classical-sculpture context.
The sudden, awkward love scene between Alex and his bossy girlfriend Jennifer (Taylor Momsen) is filmed as a sea of hair and slight, concentrated rocking shot from Alex’s befuddled point of view. It recasts young lust as a tangle of confusion, over in a flash without any time for emotional fulfillment.
Van Sant is less successful when shooting in the skateboard
park where the film gets its title. Paranoid Park is a strangely quiet
gathering place, and its boarders are shot in slow motion and fish-eye
lenses using Super 8 and digital video footage. There is a lovely chorus
line of jumping skaters in one segment, but more exciting and less pretentious
footage can be found in any number of less polished skating videos. (This
despite Doyle’s assertion that the “film wouldn’t look
and work as ‘skaterly’ as it hopefully does without the input
and access and respect that skaters and skater filmmakers gave us.”)
Still, Van Sant recognizes the peripatetic wanderings of most adolescents,
who are constantly moving just for the sake of moving, even if he can’t
quite preserve it on film. (Best to look to Richard Linklater’s
Dazed and Confused for that). These meatless string bean kids look and
act real, too: there’s a great throwaway moment when Detective Liu
rounds up a bunch of skater boys and quiets them down before some questioning—but
not before one of them cries out a Cartmanesque “Respect my authori-tai!”
Paranoid Park doesn’t look or feel like anything else in the current indie/Landmark/IFC cinema landscape. But why elevate difference for its own sake? Really, what is the point of all these sound/image experiments? Why include excerpts from a Nino Rota score when it’s not likely Alex has ever heard it anywhere? Or if Alex hasn’t heard it, then where is the allusion to (of all fucking things) Juliet of The Spirits supposed to take us? Van Sant may have reached the end of the road with this kind of highly stylized, impressionistic filmmaking.
The most striking psychological moment in the film does not rely on camera trickery or aural hallucinations at all. It comes from a discreet shot/reverse shot of Alex watching a television news report of the rail yard accident. Alex’s fear and paranoia register like ice cubes dropped down the back of a person’s shirt. But evoking fear and paranoia hardly requires the kind of technical fireworks and stylistic contortions on display here. Van Sant, in his quest to respect and record the lives of the young, has reverted to the self-conscious, cosmetic and aesthetic “rebellion” that characterizes disaffected adolescents at their irritating worst. He’s more of a teenager than the kids in his movies.
Addison Engelking writes about movies for The Memphis Flyer (www.memphisflyer.com). To his knowledge, he is the only person in the world who wrote a negative review of Superbad.