Paranoid Park

Stars: Gabe Nevins, Taylor Momsen, Jake Miller, Lauren McKinney, Dan Liu and Scott Green
Director/Scriptwriter: Gus Van Sant from the novel by Blake Nelson
IFC Films
Rating: R
Running Length: 85 minutes

 

When you see a teenage boy with a skateboard, you may automatically think “trouble.” In Paranoid Park, this is partly true. The kid gets into trouble, but in a haunting way that leaves the audience on their own skateboard of what-should-he-do-next. Director/writer Gus Van Sant has taken teenage angst in Portland, Oregon, given it small wheels, populated it with kids-on-the-fringe and shown us what happens to one kid, Alex, played by an almost-silent Gabe Nevins.

 

In the story, Alex tries to get along at home, but seems at odds with everyone, his mother and younger brother. Dad has moved out and it becomes apparent that Dad is also at odds with everyone (think mid-life crisis here). When Alex tries to connect, he finds that Dad is already making a new life with a new woman.  Families can be broken and packed away easily in this film.

 

Alex does find friendship among his peers, from a girlfriend who wants sex, to another girl who just wants to talk to him. In the meantime, boy and skateboard form a bond and head to skateboard paradise, here dubbed Paranoid Park. It’s where the kids called “crazy” by their families hang out. One night, Alex meets kids older than eighteen, and they persuade him to really travel by hitching a ride on a train boxcar. Problem is, there is an accident and someone winds up dying a gruesome death. This haunts Alex and there is no one to talk to about it. The sheer loneliness of Alex’s life looms on screen as he makes his way through the aftermath.

 

Paranoid Park starts slow. In fact, about half-way through, I was wondering just what the film was trying to say beyond “these kids need a skateboard park of their own.” Relationships dwindle in the life of Alex and he appears to distance himself from emotion as a way to cope. One wonders as he goes through life whether a skateboard would still have appeal at age thirty-five. Of course, by that time, someone like Alex would have another mode of transportation, but the idea is the same. Just quietly escape.

 

As played by Gabe Nevins, Alex is expressionless and Van Sant lets the camera spin around Alex and his skateboard. Motion is expression and emotion here, plus practicing to perfect a skill as a way to avoid practicing human contact. The grisly death is brought to the forefront on two occasions and it is the audience who reacts, not anyone else. You begin to think that Gus Van Sant wants us to believe that the people in Portland have an emotional reaction of 2.5 seconds and then it is on to other business. At that, he succeeds.