Hoodie rat: Skater star Gabe Nevins was discovered via MySpace—how appropriate.

Review

Border Insecurity

by Sean Burns

During Gus Van Sant’s fragile, deeply felt new film, we keep coming back to images of young skateboarders soaring off ramps, held aloft in slow motion for a few precious moments, only to inevitably plummet back to the pavement. This could probably be read as some sort of screamingly obvious symbolic overload regarding adolescence and falling from grace, but the movie’s dreamy, mysterious textures make it a bit trickier to parse.

Yup, Van Sant is in trance mode again, and he hasn’t adapted Blake Nelson’s acclaimed young adult novel so much as shattered it into a hypnotic drift of alienation and reverie. The movie haunts.

There have been few creative rebirths more exciting than Gus Van Sant’s career as of late. A few years ago the one-time indie darling had become a walking sell-out punch-line, not just because of that wildly misbegotten shot-for-shot Psycho remake, but maybe even more ignominiously for forcing Sean Connery to utter the phrase: “You’re the man now, dawg!” in the gruesome Finding Forrester.

Luckily for all of us, Gus Van Sant turned his back on Hollywood altogether for a series of close collaborations with cinematographer Harris Savides. Gerry, Elephant and his masterpiece Last Days are commonly considered an unofficial “Death Trilogy,” trashing conventional notions of dialogue and plot development in favor of free-floating meditations on mortality, marked by seemingly endless tracking shots and deafening silences. Quoting liberally from British filmmaker Alan Clarke and Hungarian legend Bela Tarr while also staying true to his own established peccadilloes (i.e. heartsick pretty boys, often shirtless), Van Sant’s audacious plunge into the avant-garde leaves audiences either mesmerized or infuriated.

There are those who will happily tell you that all the secrets of the universe can be understood during Gerry’s daring real-time gaze at the sunset, or when Michael Pitt makes some mac and cheese in Last Days’ big “action sequence.” Others rip their hair out and scream that nothing’s happening. Count me in the former camp.

I guess you might say Paranoid Park finds a happy medium somewhere between Van Sant’s recent experimental wanderings and the demands of an actual movie. For starters, there’s a plot. Well … sort of. Gabe Nevins (a non-actor recruited, as was most of the cast, via MySpace) stars as Alex, a sad-eyed and troubled young skateboarder who alternates between blocking out and coming to terms with his complicity in the accidental death of a security guard near the skatepark from which the film takes its title.

There’s a full police inquiry, complete with a chatty Columbo-esque detective (Daniel Liu), but Van Sant seems far more interested in scrutinizing the protagonist’s shell-shocked mindset. Framed as Alex’s discursive journal entry, the film skates across time, each scene temporally unmoored from the previous—a puzzle we need to assemble as it goes along.

Nevins has a wonderfully blank, guarded expression, and while he roams down endless high school corridors to the blare of a disjunctive soundtrack sampling everything from Beethoven to Elliott Smith to Nino Rota’s score from Juliet of the Spirits, Van Sant captures something strange and ineffable about the roiling inner turmoil and secret shame that characterizes adolescence. Parents and teachers are always glimpsed out of focus, in the far background of shots, like the disembodied authority figures of a Peanuts cartoon.

Alex tries to bleed into the background, serving as the silent bystander in every social interaction, claiming not to have an opinion on the Iraq war, barely even taking part in his own deflowering. It’s a shame the title I’m Not There was already taken, as Alex never really seems present and accounted for, until the one night this very passivity gets somebody killed.

Brilliantly shot by Christopher Doyle, the rock star of cinematographers, alongside his partner Rain Kathi Li, Paranoid Park integrates everything from 35mm to Super 8, while opening up apertures midscene in ways that will make film school instructors cry. Even the visuals have a slippery, ethereal texture, giving the sense the movie is drifting away from you even as you’re watching it. You’ll leave with a slightly woozy feeling, like one of those skateboarders we keep coming back to—temporarily floating, and just seconds away from crashing to the ground.

Paranoid Park