(directed by Gus Van Sant)
Review by Shannon Scott Stebbins
Early autumn 2001 found me rambling down Burnside Avenue in Portland, Oregon. My breath was still turning out the local ale from the night before. It was 6:05am. I was on my way to a temporary job at a homeless teen shelter downtown. The Rose City was still. Mt. Hood, which kept watch over the city, hid behind the dark, brisk air. As I was making my way down the steep street, a distant rolling wheel grated along the concrete sidewalk. It began to crescendo into a screaming shriek. A kid wearing a wet black hoodie whizzed passed me. A skateboarder. Portland spawns skateboarders.
These skaters are artfully displayed in “Paranoid Park”, the new movie directed by Gus Van Sant. What Bukowski did for hookers, winos and wounded characters clinging to the underbelly of society, Van Sant is doing for outcasts, teen angst and skaters.
The opening frame shows a Cathedral-like green bridge, one of several in Portland that marries the east and west side of the city over the Willamette River. A Hithcockian score develops during the opening credits while the camera captures Portland’s time changes in fast forward. In “Paranoid Park,” Van Sant sets out to present a different angle, a different presentation of teenage angst. There is no goofy Dad. There isn’t a band of the month song shoved in every scene. As he has done so well previously, Van Sant throws out the book on the standard teenage drama and inserts his own unique lens to follow the crowd. As he did in his previous film “Elephant,” Van Sant draws on naturalism with raw, patient strokes, rather than cookie cutting scene structure. He learned his lesson on “Finding Forrester.”
Van Sant, who makes Portland his home, shows his city’s warts and voluminous landscape. An homage to his home city, Van Sant cleverly undulates his camera between a steady cam and 35mm. Digging into cafes, skateboard shops, city parks, and wooden apartments, Van Sant does for Portland what Woody Allen does for New York City.
Having resided in Portland, a population just under 600,000, I have had barroom conversations about the legend of Gus Van Sant. No one has met him, but someone who knows someone whose neighbor saw him at the organic produce section of Trader Joe’s. He has casted a spell over the city and the locals regard him as their own.
From the vibrant multi-colored Katsura Trees to the filthy layers of the homeless teen street scene, Van Sant approaches each frame with an unforced hand. He just lets it exist, like a Jim Jarmusch film. He is starting to develop a singular voice and vision that is an indelible Van Sant signature. In “Drugstore Cowboy” he showed an auteur in the making: a rare and hauntingly beautiful vision straight out of the Northwestern fog. But he veered off the path for a while. Van Sant decided to stop making films that seemed to be hatched from think tanks and development meetings and get back to what meant something to him. Intimate, haunting pieces that may not be digestible to the conventional moviegoers’ palate, but over time stand on their own.
The protagonist in “Paranoid Park,” Alex, played by unknown Gabe Nevins, is a pretty, introverted high school kid. Van Sant, throughout his career, has extracted subtle, raw performances from young actors: Matt Dillion, Keanu Reeves and Joaquin Phoenix. Alex is a lost, inward soul affected by the divorce of his parents. He sits through brutally monotone science classes and apathetically dates a cheerleader. His fellow skate slacker friend exposes him to Paranoid Park, a grimy skateboarding mecca built by skaters under a mammoth Portland bridge. It is a dark, dangerous well, which consists of homeless teens and convicts. Alex feels alive and connected, if only by the subtle look in his eyes. He sees skaters flash maddening skills on homemade half pipes, fittingly conveyed with a grainy picture. Award winning Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who worked with Van Sant in the 1998 remake of “Psycho”, oscillates between blurry color and lush photography. The viewer gets two different pictures for the price of one.
Alex accepts the invitation by an older mysterious resident of Paranoid Park, which results in murder. Within a brief moment he’s made a decision that will haunt him.
Alex is interrogated at school. At one point, all of the skaters at the high school are called into a room. Striding through the hall, one after another, Van Sant captures the high school misfits in slow motion. They are unkempt, yet cool, similar to the crew in “Reservoir Dogs.”
One of the cops, well played by Daniel Liu says, “We are just here to get to know the skateboard community.” To which one of the skaters replies, “We aren’t a community, we don’t even hang out together.” Van Sant hits it on the head. Hollywood often packages teenage films in clumpy stereotypes. Van Sant just hangs out with them and lets you do the judging.
Alex decided to write about his ghastly feelings but he ends up burning his diary of notes. He ends up sleeping with the cheerleader but stares blankly preoccupied through this epic moment. When he ends their relationship, she retorts with a lot of head tilting and “like, ums”, Van Sant deftly shoots this sequence with the dialogue muted. We have heard it all before.
Many films also use a musical score to make a point, to help drive the audience to a feeling they are supposed to have. Van Sant uses music to add texture to a scene. As for the feeling? He stays out of the way, and again, lets the viewers decide. Oddly, all of the music fits in this film: fifties sock hop, French, gangster rap, country folk. and death metal. Van Sant also uses his old lyrical muse, the late Eliot Smith, who in a three-minute song can impart the Pacific Northwest’s perpetual drizzle and melancholy.
Even the sound editing, mixed by Felix Andrew, scores a knockout by catching chirping birds and the crisp gliding of train wheels along metal tracks.
This is not a whodunit film. This isn’t a teenage drama. “Paranoid Park” is an expose on raw, human emotion and how it affects us. While working at the homeless teen shelter I saw many of the kids portrayed in this film. They are like all teenage kids: lost, confused and in desperate need of an outlet far from their living room.
