The very first shot of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park imparts that delicious feeling of being in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing. The credits roll demurely next to a Portland bridge, cars whoosh by, light plays on the water and the trees, glitchy electronic atmospheric music drowns out any natural sounds. Like many shots in the carefully constructed movie, every second feels perfect—crafted, like a painting. Every color, every trick of the light feels true and drastic.
Paranoid Park is about stories, narrative and memory, a mystery, a character portrayal and a tone poem. In other words, it’s a movie about the purpose and the point of movies. The story, based on a “young adult” book by Blake Nelson, is about Alex, a teenage skater in Portland, but it is inside out, elliptical. Scenes are repeated, shown, narrated, acted out, retold from different angles. At the end you’re not entirely sure what happens next. There may be pieces missing, and you’re never sure who’s perspective you’re hearing it from, anyway. Alex tells parts out of order, skips over the important things, says that he will “get it all on paper eventually.” One of the best constructed scenes, in which the skaters are called to the high school principal’s office, starts with Alex alone in the middle as one by one boys with long hair and knit caps spill out of the side doors, holding boards and backpacks, pulling their group together. But moments later it’s undercut, as one of the boys tells the cop that there is no skateboarding community, they don’t really know each other.
Van Sant cast mostly unknowns and amateurs (except Alex’s girlfriend, played by Taylor Momsen, Jenny on Gossip Girl). Gabe Nevins, as Alex, is a movie star in hiding. The one moment when he smiles, looking into the camera in a home video segment, you get a jolt of awe and charisma. But throughout the rest of his story he keeps it down, remains blank and expressionless, big eyes that show nothing. A lost boy, he keeps everything in, even as he and the world around him becoming increasingly at odds. He has more emotion telling a teacher “Mayo sucks!’ then when he talks to his girlfriend, or when he hears about his parents’ divorce.
Much of the film is composed of slow motion shots of Alex and his peers gliding through their lives. Van Sant uses Elliott Smith a lot, and his films are sort of the equivalent of the songs, deeply emotional but delicate, behind veils. Everything feels terribly poignant, and yet not messy, not passionate or chaotic. But for a movie so hushed and muffled, it has a tremendous feeling of freedom and flight. Impressionistic shots of skateboarders flying through the air in the titular skate park feel weightless, feel like watching humans transcend the boundaries of their world, physically and metaphorically.
Even though it’s only 85 minutes long, Paranoid Park drags a little bit toward the beginning and the end. And it’s not a thrill ride or a rip-roaring narrative; it demands involvement, attention, enrapturement. Like its protagonist, it keeps everything inside, never lets on what it’s thinking, never talks directly at you, but rather looking at somewhere just beyond your left ear. But if you pay attention, you can see flashes of beauty.
