Paranoid Park (2007)

A recent, characteristically excellent, appraisal by Christian Divine motivated me to take another look at Enter the Dragon, which I hadn’t seen in years; and this picture clarified for me my tendency to reject certain pictures that critics praise to the stratosphere each and every year. In the film, a teacher asks Bruce Lee, “The highest technique you hope to achieve?” Lee replies, without hesitation, “To have no technique.”

Certain filmmakers understand the expression; Jean Renior and Robert Altman did, Hsiao-hsien Hou and Olivier Assayas do, and, I’m thinking, based on Shotgun Stories, that Jeff Nichols just might also. Most American filmmakers, even the great ones, do not. Most American filmmakers, again, even the great ones, feel the need to revel in the highs of their virtuosity, sometimes at the expense of the effect of the film they are making. This issue of “technique” kept me from falling for Gus Van Sant’s more recent pictures, such as Elephant and Last Days. Paranoid Park is another of Van Sant’s ennui and confusion among the younger generation pictures; and, this time, I actually believed that was actually the filmmaker’s intention.

Elephant and Last Days are supposed to be about a Columbine-inspired tragedy and a Kurt Cobain stand-in, respectively, but the pictures were actually about Van Sant himself and his reaction to the commercial track his films had been taking before Gerry (which I’ve missed). Elephant and Last Days are effective on a surface level - their subjects are too loaded for them not to be, but there’s too much bleak-chic art-mindedness, too much “technique” to them. We come away from these pictures considering the artfulness of Van Sant’s long shots rather than feeling the horror he’s clearly intending, and we’re not even considering as much as we should be. Elephant and Last Days are the kind of movies that are almost always over-praised; that are so unyieldingly unpleasant that people assume they just must be about something that might be eluding them. Those pictures were about a talented filmmaker experimenting (admirably) but stumbling. Elephant and Last Days lacked the emotional surprise and shading of Van Sant’s best work (such as Drugstore Cowboy) - they were overbearing and pre-digested for us.

Van Sant’s brief commercial period isn’t as shameful as he may find it to be anyway. Good Will Hunting was a formula picture – a variation on the “one good teacher” movie, but Van Sant’s intuitive, low-key approach saved it – you didn’t feel as dumb as usual for swallowing the clichés. And the Psycho remake was probably the riskiest picture of Van Sant’s career - a noble experiment in directly channeling and connecting with a past master. (Connection could be the word that governs Van Sant’s work anyway.) The Psycho remake isn’t a good movie, or even a particularly watchable one, but it was a gambit that doesn’t require apology either. Finding Forrester is the one bald cash grab in the Van Sant canon; and it seemingly sent him scrambling back to rediscover something.

I think Van Sant may have rediscovered that something in Paranoid Park, a picture that successfully fuses the old and new phases of the filmmaker. This picture is manipulative too, and it has the stacked deck of a young adult novel (which it is, in fact, taken from) but the picture is also Van Sant’s most playful since To Die For (which, truthfully, is also uneven). There are the usual shortcuts, such as the protagonists’ parents that are either off-screen or blank or largely uncommunicative; but the picture surprises you when you think you’ve got it figured out.

Paranoid Park, using the same surface approach as Van Sant’s prior pictures (consciously long, static takes; deliberate non-dialogue), directly connects to its protagonist, Alex (Gabe Nevins), and achieves a disconcertingly pure empathy. This is one of those pictures that clarify the intent of its creator’s previous few films – where the others felt calculated, Paranoid Park feels effortless, human. The limitations in tone have become the short-comings in our protagonist’s perceptions - and while we knew that of the other pictures too, it never totally registered, we couldn’t ever quite engage with what Van Sant was doing. The difference? Van Sant allows spontaneity to creep in this time – we’re allowed a peek at what can be lost.

Paranoid Park won me over, about a third of the way in, when Van Sant shows Alex and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Jennifer (Taylor Momsen) trying on tuxedos and dresses. The scene isn’t overplayed, and, more crucial to Van Sant, it isn’t underplayed either. We watch as these two awkward confused kids, who’ve yet to have sex, but are considering it, tinker with being adults (this scene is, in effect, a pre-test to their deflowering). In this moment; and in moments between Alex and his girl-that’s-a-friend Macy (Lauren McKinney), Van Sant rediscovers his gift for scenes with discombobulating mood shifts and for seemingly instantly establishing interpersonal connections. And Van Sant even gives us a pause toward the end, between Alex and his father, that tells us more about Alex’s parents’ separation in a few seconds than most pictures pack in their entire running times.

By stepping back, and by finding non-actors that connect more than they ever have for him before (Nevins and McKinney are particularly haunting – the former recalling a less self-possessed Wiley Wiggins in Dazed and Confused), Van Sant achieves a stream-of-consciousness that’s unfettered by coffee-house ticks. And those ticks, when they appear, have true gravity, it doesn’t feel as if Van Sant is showing off. There’s a long take in a shower, an attempted purge of guilt, that might be the strongest scene in the movie; and there’s a tracking shot of Alex in a hallway in his high-school that conjures, perfectly, a state of zoning out. This picture has a death in it also, and it feels like the intrusion that was always intended in the prior pictures – it punctures Van Sant’s airy mood, and world. A character learns to live with a terrible accident in Paranoid Park, and it’s a testament to the effect of Van Sant’s film that you don’t know whether the character’s healing represents progress, or moral erosion, or simply – most terrifyingly – nothing.

★★★½

Posted on July 29th, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Drama |

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