Teenage Wasteland

[March 19th, 2008]

The release of a new Gus Van Sant movie shot in Portland is an event that nearly deserves its own civic holiday. Paranoid Park does not disappoint in this regard—it is the best advertisement for Rose City scenery to be found outside the pages of the New York Times travel section. From the opening credits, which feature cars and clouds racing across the St. Johns Bridge, Van Sant and cinematographer Christopher Doyle travel to the Park Blocks of PSU, capture the Steel Bridge bathed in lightning, whirl around the Lloyd Mall ice-skating rink and, of course, glide among the skateboarders at Burnside Skate Park. Just a few minutes of this is enough to inflate Portland pride to dangerous levels. Little wonder that when a character dials information midway through the movie, the electronic voice announces, “Happy Citizenship Day.”

But for all the sightseeing, Paranoid Park’s greatest achievement is the mapping of mental geography. In the year since the movie made its Cannes debut, it has been commonplace to see it described as a skater-punk Crime and Punishment—a handsome phrase, but not an entirely accurate one. Accident and Avoidance is more like it. Van Sant has fiddled with Blake Nelson’s young-adult novel so that its protagonist, a latchkey kid named Alex (Gabe Nevins), emerges not as a neurotic Raskolnikov but as a holy innocent. His crime—a fatal shove of a security guard—is panicked and unintentional, and his feelings of guilt don’t lead to a moral awakening so much as a haze of isolation. As Alex drifts along rows of high-school lockers, and his memories spill out as a jumble of events with no discernible sequence, it becomes clear that the movie is functioning as his reluctant confession, his attempt to cut through the fog. He’s not just an unreliable narrator: He doesn’t really want to be narrating at all.

That makes him a perfect fit for Van Sant, who in the most recent chapter of an elastic career has often seemed like he didn’t want to tell any stories either. Influenced by the languid long takes of Hungarian director Bela Tarr, Van Sant has observed his subjects from a cool distance, as if getting too close to the beautiful boys he was filming—or giving them motivations and story arcs—would be obscene. That aesthetic was fatal to 2003’s Elephant, a movie that felt calculating when it needed to be scary, and ponderous when it wanted to be profound. But with Alex, Van Sant has finally found a character as alienated as he is, and he engages fully with the kid’s state of mind. Maybe it’s a happy accident, maybe it’s a stroke of genius, but Van Sant has stopped simply gazing at teenagers and finally evoked what it feels like to be one of them: detached, drifting and unsure which events in your own life are going to matter.

Not every aspect of this project is a success. The emphasis on Alex’s cherubic innocence (accentuated not only by Gabe Nevins’ impossibly large eyes but by Doyle lighting his face with beams of light from the heavens) wears thin quickly. And Van Sant’s risky casting—he found most of the young performers on MySpace—doesn’t always pay off; Nevins is a promising discovery, but many of the other actors deliver their lines with the woodenness of a first audition. But so much else contributes to the movie’s unique mood: The movie’s songs—from Elliott Smith tracks to Cool Nutz beats—are consistently tied to unlikely images, so that the entire movie seems to be suffering from an attack of depersonalization, while Doyle’s camera isolates skaters in midflight so that they float through the frame to no landing place at all.

“You know there’s dead bodies buried here, underneath the cement?” a skate-park regular asks Alex by way of introduction. Throughout his career—and never more so than in Paranoid Park—Gus Van Sant has been charting the whole of Portland with that question in mind. In his vision, this city is a place where the young and vulnerable are confronted with physicality and death, and a place where, if they’re lucky, they can bury those formative experiences away in some derelict corner. Now he’s returned with a renewed empathy to show how another generation is hiding its most troubling memories under the Burnside Bridge. Happy Citizenship Day, indeed.