— Mike Waters, My own private Idaho
“I just feel like there’s something outside of normal life. Outside of teachers, breakups, girlfriends. Like, right out there, like outside - there’s like different levels of... stuff.”
3rd Party Review
3.5 stars
Normally, you wouldn’t want to pay attention to a story told by a
the other Greatest Cinematographer in the World, to capture the
Akiva Gottlieb
guy who admits, right off the bat, that he’s “not that good at creative
Super-8 swirl of skate-kid hero worship and the haze of adolescent
IMDB Review
writing.” But Gus Van Sant’s haunting and immediate Paranoid Park
panic. (Leslie Shatz’s sound design sporadically offers musique
understands adolescence as a kind of first draft, a series of raw
concréte as a way of conveying Alex’s fractured mental state.)
experiences unmediated by wisdom, and as a result it allows its ver-
Where Elephant‘s camera treated its beautifully doomed youths
bally-challenged protagonist to narrate in his own imperfect voice,
like lab rats, the style of Paranoid Park is perfectly in sync with its
rather than imposing a Wonder Years-style voice-over conscience.
lead character; it reflects Alex’s internal coping mechanisms. When
The films in Van Sant’s recent long-take trilogy (Gerry, Elephant,
Alex’s girlfriend responds to his fumbling we-need-to-break-up
Last Days) took sensationalist news stories from real life and then
plea, we see her vitriol, but we hear Nino Rota’s theme from Juliet of
stripped them of all causality, as a way of portraying human activity
the Spirits as a way of rendering the moment intriguingly grotesque
as essentially random and undetermined. But Paranoid Park is a
instead of just painful. Where Elliott Smith’s acoustic dirges served
deeper and even more bracing step into the unknown for the vet-
as pretty window dressing in Good Will Hunting, here the trou-
eran filmmaker, a fully subjective probe into the consciousness of a
badour’s mope music soothes like a necessary balm for wounds
young man and a generous display of artistic empathy.
accumulated in high school hallways.
Based on a young adult novel by Blake Nelson, Paranoid Park
The Iraq War comes up in conversation more than once in
follows a shy high-school-aged Portland skateboarder named Alex
Paranoid Park, as an abstract illustration of the type of pain and
(Gabe Nevins) after an impulsive decision leads to the accidental
guilt disconnected masses should be feeling. Obviously, it’s a diffi-
murder of a security guard on a train track not far from the titular
cult emotional jump from a Portland coffee shop to a battle-scarred
skate-punk mecca. Alex is not suspected in the crime, so he keeps
Baghdad, and the world is indeed too big a place for an ignorant
his involvement a secret. Consequently, his world begins to revolve
kid to have to incorporate that kind of horror. Being a kid is about
in terrifying slow orbit: His cheerleader girlfriend (Taylor Momsen)
keeping responsibility at bay and dismissing causality. (In its amoral
openly displays her previously unapparent vapidity, his parents’
disengagement, Elephant seemed childlike to a fault.) Van Sant’s
impending divorce rapidly materializes, and Alex quietly reconsiders
film microscopically reduces the scale of its moral universe to that
his emotional priorities. “I think…there’s different levels of stuff,” he
of a single person—and the one stupid decision that will haunt his
tentatively concludes, and it seems impossible not to intuit exactly
entire life—and by engaging fully in the experiment Paranoid Park
what he means.
earns its humanist stripes. By illuminating a little world where we
Van Sant cast the film using MySpace in order to foster a
can empathize with an “unrepentant murderer,” Van Sant momen-
sense of realism, but Paranoid Park is just as stylized as Elephant.
tarily awakens our potential to spread our understanding across the
Only the ends are different. Instead of depending on his long-take
street, across the park, across the globe. You start small, because,
standby Harris Savides, Van Sant turned to Christopher Doyle,
well…there’s different levels of stuff.