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Paranoid Park is a sort of reverie on the terrible no-man's-land of adolescence -- fairly typical Gus Van Sant turf. When a moment of teen stupidity goes wrong, a gentle skater-boy moves from ennui to emptiness, unsure how to right the wrong he has done and terrified about what happens next.
In Paranoid Park, Alex (Gabe Nevins) is a soft-spoken kid who likes to skateboard with his best friend. They go to one park in Portland, Ore., where lots of board rats skate, and maybe even live. "Throwaway kids", the movie calls them. The young adults who skateboard at Paranoid Park are good at the sport, because that's all they have in their lives. The kids are on the tough side. Adults are absent. Alex and his friend get to feel as if they're taking a walk on the wild side when they visit Paranoid Park. And they are, too.
Alex has a sort-of girlfriend named Jennifer (Taylor Momsen) who sometimes nags him into consciousness. Otherwise, he goes to school, tries to deal with his parents' divorce and his little brother's anxiety, and keeps his head down.
The film opens with a dream-like skateboard sequence, like a home movie with beautiful music. Throughout Paranoid Park there are these dreamy moments, snippets somehow suspended outside of real life.
Alex is writing in a journal, and soon we discover why: A security guard has been killed in a train accident. A discarded skateboard could be a piece of evidence, and police are convinced the guard was murdered. They want to interview Alex and all the other skateboarders at his school.
The centre of Paranoid Park appears to be Alex's determination not to think. He doesn't want to think about his home life, his girlfriend or the incident the police are investigating. He seems not to know how to think about anything; a friend suggests he write down all the things he cannot say, and so he writes in a journal.
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The film is like a slow, sad decline, a loss of innocence and promise, and it plays out just as if you were living in Alex's head. His isolation is heartbreaking. In a moment of crisis, he has only himself to talk to. The teenagers in Alex's life seem to exist in a general state of confusion, moving between school and the mall. There are no guidelines, no one to look up to, no lessons to learn. It's fairly depressing.
Paranoid Park will be catnip for Van Sant fans (the music and cinematography are complicated and chewy) but potentially tough sledding for everybody else. As usual at a Van Sant movie, we were stumped by certain details and their meaning -- or lack of it. What, for example, is the significance of Alex's father's extensive tattoos?
The film, which was shown here last fall at the Toronto film festival, was a huge hit at Cannes and was nominated for the Golden Palm. It eventually won a special 60th Anniversary Prize, and it won another award at the Independent Spirit Awards. Paranoid Park is based on the novel by Blake Nelson, who seems to know his way around youth culture in America. Why anyone would willingly venture into that territory remains a mystery.
(This film is rated 14-A)