Skater Boy Culture Takes Center Stage in Cult Director Van Sant’s ‘Paranoid Park’

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CHICAGO – For “Paranoid Park,” cult director Gus Van Sant returns to high school, which is the setting of his previous chilling look into the Columbine incident in 2003’s “Elephant”. Though not as successful as “Elephant,” “Paranoid Park” evokes a dream-like meditation on the trials and extreme tribulations of a skateboarding teenage boy trying to find his way.

“Paranoid Park”. Photo credit: IMDb

Newcomer Gabe Nevins is Alex: a disaffected adolescent coping with the dissolution of his parent’s marriage. Though essentially a good kid, Alex starts to act out in reaction to his life and separates himself from his family, girlfriend and even his skater buds.

He becomes obsessed with writing down his story, which centers on rebellious Paranoid Park. It’s an erstwhile gathering site for the skateboard culture carved under a bridge abutment in Portland, Ore.

His feverish, written meanderings take on an anguished air as the truth about his life is slowly revealed. This includes an incident that occurred near the park, which the police are actively investigating.

Van Sant seems in love with high school politics and cliques. For the filmmaker, the stoic and institutional hallways possess secret heartbeats under its polished floors.

“Paranoid Park”. Photo credit: IMDb

His emphasis is especially concerned with the skater boy culture and the anarchistic wheelers with their high-flying stunts and tricks (who in this film become scapegoats for general societal complications).

The film is told in bursts of flashback, flash forward and even flash sideways all framed in a dream-world sense. The slow-motion theatrics of skater tricks are particularly beautiful and almost a flight from the reality of the cruel teen years.

Nevins is able to maintain Alex’s emotional blankness to an effective fault.

I got so used to his shambling and disinterested posing that when he finally did react strongly to a local news report on the incident near Paranoid Park it was as jarring as Sean Penn doing one of his patented screaming acts.

One paradox that Van Sant expresses regarding teenage guy culture respects the fear and loathing of those early hormonal years by reversing Alex’s desperation for sex with his girlfriend instead of the usual horny boy begging. The actual act is so empty that an immediate call the girlfriend makes to a colleague is played as dreadful irony.

“Paranoid Park”. Photo credit: IMDb

Another highlight is a hilarious “exchange” between Alex and his younger brother.

As Alex sits aloof, his hyperbolic 13-year-old sibling uses a frantic cadence to describe a movie plot. The dawning in this scene is when I realized what film he was describing.

If there was a special Oscar for a narrative scene most in need of Ritalin, this would have been the hands-down winner.

Though the film has an incomplete feel to it, I wonder if Van Sant will aim his camera down those high school hallways at least one more time to complete a trilogy of an Americana theme that is as tricky to dissect as a six-legged frog in biology class. Ah, school days – those good-old golden-rule days.

By PATRICK McDONALD Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com