Paranoid Park

Paranoid Park
2007
Directed By Gus Van Sant



SYNOPSIS

Skateboarding teen Alex (Gabe Nevins) accidentally kills a security guard and decides to cover it up.



MY THOUGHTS

Indy director Gus Van Sant scores again with an offbeat tale involving troubled teens.

The film is shockingly similar to Van Sant's previous film about a school shooting, Elephant. Both use minimal dialogue, non-professional actors, and a non-linear storyline. In Elephant the storyline was used to tell the story from different character's perspectives, but here we only see the story from Alex's POV. That doesn't stop several shots from getting reused.
The overly-long tracking shots of Alex as he makes his way through school could have fit perfectly in Elephant and a virtually identical to similar shots in that film.

I'm not sure if Van Sant uses these long tracking shots, the non-linear story, and overly-long slow-motion skateboarding shots to be artsy... or to help beef up the thread-bare story in order to get it to feature-length.

Like with Elephant, Van Sant uses almost exclusively first-time actors. Although John Robinson was a standout in Elephant, that film was an ensemble piece, so many of the sub-par performances blended into the film. Here in Paranoid Park, the character of Alex is onscreen in nearly every shot, requiring very skilled actor. Gabe Nevins does an amazing job. He's able to portray very subtle nuances with little dialogue. The audience sympathizes with him knowing he is so wracked up over the murder... and his fears of coming clean. This was his first (of hopefully many) acting jobs.

Paranoid Park could have easily fallen into the category of "pretentious bullshit" like Van Sant's previous film Last Days... but there's something indescribable that lifts it from that category into a great film.