Paranoid Park

Director: Gus Van Sant
Cast: Gabe Nevins, Daniel Liu, Taylor Momsen, Jake Miller
Running time: 90 minutes

Plot: Alex (Nevins) is a teen who likes skatboarding but isn’t very good at it — he’s not ready for Paranoid Park, a skate park built illegally by local street kids. Haunted by the guilt of his unintentional involvement in a man’s death, Alex decides to write a letter of confession.

I imagine this will be a polarizing film. I don’t just mean because it’s Gus Van Sant: if you don’t like voyeuristic takes of beautiful, unknown teenagers, long, pointless shots of people walking, driving, or sitting, and plenty of slo-mo, why did you pay for the ticket? Rather, seeing the reaction the film got at Cannes (it won the 60th Anniversary Prize), it’s obvious that some people will love the performances and the audiovisual aesthetic; others will find the whole thing unconvincing, pretentious, and disjointed.

For mine, this film revisits too much of Elephant’s ground, without doing it quite so well. Once more, we’re in a high school in Portland. Again, grisly death lies at the heart of the drama. This time, though, we’re focused almost exclusively on one teen, Alex, and one accidental death.

What made Elephant work was the ad-libbed, strangely-naturalistic-yet-dreamy portrayal of the commonplace school day, juxtaposed with the horror of a shooting spree. The impact comes from the very ordinariness of the school interrupted by a terrifying, monstrous act. On some level, it taps into the fears of everyone.

In Paranoid Park, I found I couldn’t really share Alex’s pain: despite the awful outcome of his actions (I won’t spoil it), we can see that there was nothing malicious in him, and it really could have happened to anyone. It’s hard to feel sorry for him when he could easily ’fess up. Maybe we need to understand better what he thinks the consequences would be.

And it is perhaps this that makes Alex a little unbelievable: he won’t crack under pressure from the police, and yet he consistently lacks nerve in other settings. Although some have praised Nevins’ verisimilitude, I found his wavering narrative and quavering voice fairly annoying and unconvincing. The less said about Momsen's self-conscious performance, the better.

Meanwhile, the plot seems unnecessarily splintered, and, rather than build character or atmosphere, many of GVS’s trademark lengthy shots just seem here to be scrabbling for an excuse to round out an eclectic but unsatisfying soundtrack. Further, I found the original score wearing and overweening.

It all adds up to a very long 90 minutes.

Verdict: Only for GVS fans. In the meantime, if you need a fix of him in this mode, you’d be better off rewatching Gerry, Elephant, or even Last Days.