Paranoid Park
DIR/WRI: Gus Van Sant • PROD: David Cress, Charles Gilibert, Nathanaël Karmitz Neil Kopp. • DOP: Christopher Doyle,  Kathy Li.• ED: Gus Van Sant • DES: John Pearson-Denning • CAST: Gabe Nevins, Daniel Liu, Taylor Momsen ,Jake Miller, Lauren McKinney

Gus Van Sant’s latest film opens with grainy, tail-gaiting footage of a skater skimming over the various obstacles in a skate park. This skate park is Paranoid Park. It’s also the title of a fragmented narrative; an inarticulate jumble of scrawl penned by Alex (Gabe Nevins) that gradually organises itself into a murder confession.

But Alex is not your typical murderer. He’s a rather unassuming guy. He’s got unassuming skater friends and a lackadaisical, almost jaded attitude to his highly strung Avril Lavigne-type girlfriend (Taylor Momsen). He’s an underwhelming, unassuming, middleclass, suburban teenager whose single nod to a bad background is in the direction of his divorcing parents. And in his neighbourhood, that doesn’t make him special. The only thing that seems to coax him that half-inch above apathy is Paranoid Park. One night Alex braves the park alone and falls in with an older, dodgier customer who entices him to booze up and ride freight trains. The adventure, however, is short-lived. Alex fends off a chasing security man, striking him over the head with his skateboard, and the man falls back, into the path of an oncoming train. It’s a grisly situation, and Alex decides to keep his mouth shut.

These events gradually gain coherence in Alex’s stilted, juvenile prose that often backtracks and skips ahead when his thoughts fragment. Nevins audibly slurs and hesitates in one or two places with this possibly unrehearsed narration giving it that realistic edge, and a lot of the dialogue in the film smacks of improvisation. It’s a nice touch. With such banal dialogue we expect banal action, so when the magnificently operatic depiction of violence does rear up, it’s fairly shocking. But the film’s focus is on Alex’s mounting paranoia. 

A few scenes in, he takes us down the school corridor, a slow, dreamy green mile, into the room where a detective waits. The camera, fixed on Alex, slowly pans up the table through the ensuing interview, tension steadily mounting as he’s softly grilled about his actions and whereabouts the night the security man died. We’re right in Alex’s face when he’s told a skateboard was the possible murder weapon. He makes the return journey up that slow, dreamy corridor having lied formidably through his teeth but he’s now constantly looking over his shoulder.

There are a lot of these dreamy, slow-motion walking scenes. And there are a few old-school tension building techniques thrown in, notably the cacophonous shower scene. But the film is ultimately let down by Nevins. He does well to show the slightest hint of the inner turmoil his character must be experiencing as a kid who’s responsible for the grim demise of some hapless security guard. It’s a performance on the lacklustre end of understated.

But overall the premise is an interesting one and Van Sant captures perfectly, without any frills, the essence of youth culture. And those dreamy, grainy skating scenes are woven at random into what is, on the whole, a dreamy, albeit slightly dragged out film. But dreamy is the key word here and in the end we’re left wondering if it was all just a dream in some unassuming, underwhelming guy’s head. Makes you think.

Aoife Nic Ardghail

Rated 15A (see IFCO website for details)
Paranoid Park is released on 28th December 2007
Paranoid Park – Official website