Film Review: Paranoid Park

Forget the Oscars, Gus Van Sant wins the Most Attitudinizing Filmmaker in America Prize for Paranoid Park. Van Sant’s latest jailbait drama follows lank-haired Alex (Gabe Nevins), a Portland, Ore., high school skateboarder, through his lonely disaffection after accidentally killing a railroad security guard. Alex likes to hang out at the dangerous skaters’ spot called “Paranoid Park,” which Van Sant depicts languorously via time-lapse photography to suggest a grimy, druggy, euphoric retreat from normal society. Alex notes that “train-hoppers, guitar punks, throwaway kids” congregate in the park, and it’s a place he’s drawn to despite his comfortable middle-class background.

Van Sant seems to share Alex’s bad-boy fascination and pumps it full of art-movie clichés: 8mm iconography, fish-eye lenses and slo-mo lyricism. Although not nearly as offensive as the 2005 Elephant (Van Sant’s exploitation of the Columbine High School massacre), Paranoid Park is a variation on the same Dirty Old Man voyeurism. Van Sant seems infatuated with the current teen generation’s lack of moral compass and inability to communicate its deepest feelings. Alex dates wild-eyed Rachel (Taylor Momsen) but is afraid that her virgin status will compel him to sex; and he’s turned-off by plump-cheeked Macy (Lauren McKinney), who obsesses over the Iraq War that he’s indifferent to.

The actors were cast from My Space postings for extra realism, and these American Idol–era kids acquit themselves believably, but Paranoid Park contrives teenage melodrama. For some freaky reason, Van Sant (adapting a novel by Blake Wilson) feels it’s necessary to fit real kids into murderous plots like Nick Cassavetes’ Alpha Dog and Larry Clark’s Bully. Alex’s flashbacks to the murder are equally trashy; the only difference is that Van Sant is a more accomplished exploiter than either Cassavetes or Clark.

Paranoid Park has been extravagantly praised (even winning Van Sant a career achievement award at Cannes last spring) because it is unmistakably “art.” His Psycho cinematographer Christopher Doyle returns from Wong Kar Wai duty to supply deliberately stylized images of alienation and existential mystery. The long, one-shot scene where Alex takes a shower to wash off his guilt grows darker and more indiscernible—communicating psychotic breakdown and more (bird squawks spook the soundtrack). It’s like a Million Dollar Baby outtake but without the mainstream Hollywood uplift.

Admittedly, Van Sant’s technique is impressive: After Alex’s call to his distant father goes unanswered, in a later scene where Jennifer phones her friends to boast of her deflowering, the ring tone is both doom-laden and familiar—a masterful arrangement of sound effects. But this doesn’t mean falling for Van Sant’s conceits. Can this man be trusted after his willing participation in the J.T. Leroy hoax and its salacious exploitation of teenage alienation and sex abuse? Scenes such as skateboarders parading down a school corridor—like the final march in The Wild Bunch—are unforgivably contrived. So is the pretense of a Portland cop questioning sequestered minors as to their whereabouts in “the skateboarding community.”

This view of rap-loving white kids panders to youth culture while prizing its affectlessness. Close-ups of Jennifer purloin Nino Rota’s Juliet of the Spirits score to create enigma, not romance. Van Sant refuses optimism and trendy critics reward his deadly attitude (ludicrously proclaiming his previous three films a “Death Trilogy.”) That Fellini rip-off is, like the hip-hop interlude, a snarky allusion to dislocation: Alex’s solipsistic retreat from the world. (After There Will Be Blood, enough already with the dissociated musical counterpoint!) Despite its Nirvana-like title, Paranoid Park isn’t a genuine youth movie. Van Sant reaches out to teen subculture, only to embalm its dissatisfaction in artiness. It’s a less credible view of skateboarding than Lords of Dogtown and dour Alex lacks the appeal and realness of Téchiné’s protagonist/lifeforce Johan Liberteau in The Witnesses.

Just when it looked like Van Sant was finally ready to present a movie real people might want to watch, Paranoid Park abandons universality and fetishizes the generality of skater boys.