Balancing Act

A high school skateboarder grapples with issues big and small in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park.

by Shaun Brady

Recommended

BOY WANDER: Alex (Gabe Nevins) drifts around to distract himself from his guilt. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

There's no real mystery at the center of Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park. Though all the hallmarks are there — the police investigation, the lead character with a guilty secret, the jumbled chronology dealing out parcels of revelation — only the fine details are in question. There's never any doubt about the facts.

That, really, is the tragedy that keeps coming home throughout the course of the film. Alex (Gabe Nevins), adrift (often literally) in life, is attempting to put a terrible chain of events behind him, but the stubborn reality continually intrudes on his hazy reveries.

Alex is a typical high school outsider, in the grand sense that every teenager feels like an outsider. But the usual angst, with girlfriends and teachers, plays out as he grapples with a weightier dilemma. There's a murder investigation taking place at the school, a security guard found dead at a train yard near a local skate park, and it's obvious that Alex knows more than he's telling.

Van Sant lets the story unfold wholly through Alex's eyes — or more accurately, through his pen. At the urging of a friend, he's putting down the events of the night in question in a notebook, simply to get them out of his head in some way.

Alex admits right off the bat that he "didn't do so well in creative writing," and the ensuing voiceover bears the halting, tongue-tied delivery of a nervous kid giving an oral report in front of class. And the way the story unfolds onscreen, with insignificant scenes competing for attention with more obviously relevant material — the obsessive reworking of incidents — bear the signature of a semi-literate storyteller trying to get at some essential truth but lacking the comprehension to quite understand it all.

Most of the cast was enlisted via MySpace, and while the results pay off with aptly phrased performances and defiantly non-Hollywood types, the methodology still comes off as something of a gimmick. Van Sant has certainly coaxed unconventional performances in the past out of unglamorous types who still came from an acting background. But the use of social networking sites hints at a director attempting to assert his understanding of contemporary youth — always a high hurdle for a 55-year-old filmmaker. Van Sant clears it better than most, but there are still stumbles that betray the gap in generational perspective. The most glaring of these is the depiction of Alex's parents, out-and-out ciphers shown either faceless or out of focus. It's an obvious trick that brings nothing to mind so much as the wah-wah-voiced adults from Peanuts cartoons.

But for the most part, the subjective approach presents a lyrically disorienting view of Alex's troubled consciousness, a disconnect from his surroundings colored by mundane issues on one side and the repressed memories threatening to burst free on the other. There's a sensual distractedness to much of the film, a tinge of tunnel vision, where dialogue and action seem distant. Only at moments when Alex is forced into a state of especial attention do things come into focus, especially during the interrogation scenes, compellingly drained of phony drama.

Van Sant focuses on the in-between moments, the detritus of daily life — from the taunting of friends to a little brother recounting a scene from Napoleon Dynamite in excruciating detail. The awkward interactions are as much the results of being young and uncertain as they are of suffering a guilty conscience. The blood on his hands is something that Alex obsesses over, desperately wants to take back, and that impinges constantly on his thoughts; but the sense of drifting through life with no future, that may well have been in his mind the day before his visit to the train yard as the day after.

There are countless returns to video imagery of skaters, shot by Rain Kathy Li, seeming cul-de-sacs branching off Christopher Doyle's more languid, untethered cinematography. They, along with endless scenes of slow-motion wanders down school hallways, begin to feel like padding, even at a slight 88 minutes. But in their repetition, they capture the aimless freedom of these kids, the community of skaters who repeatedly find themselves hanging weightlessly, only to fall back to earth over and over again.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Paranoid Park

Directed by Gus Van Sant

An IFC Films release