Looking not quite big enough to
reach the pedals, Gabe Nevins sits behind the wheels of a car early in Paranoid
Park. Happily
cruising through a Portland night, he lets the music on the radio wash over
him, changing his expression and demeanor as the styles shift from hip-hop to
rock to country. He's young, free, and licensed, and though he has his share of
problems—his parents' divorce foremost among them—life has yet to
pen him in. Flash to another scene: Nevins walks in slow motion through his
high school, accompanied by the minor-key melancholy of Elliott Smith's
"Angeles." Though Gus Van Sant's elliptical approach to the story has yet to
reveal exactly why, it's clear from the look of dark reverie on Nevins' face
that his life has found its unhappy soundtrack.
Based on Blake Nelson's young-adult
novel, Paranoid Park explores how Nevins' character gets from one point to the other, and
the question of whether what's brought him there will ever let him leave. Using
Nevins' confessional letter to an unknown recipient as a framing device, Van
Sant jumps around in chronology, first showing his protagonist's reluctance to
visit the quasi-legal, fringe-character-populated skate park that gives the
film its title, then showing him being called out of class for police
questioning. It takes the film a while to reveal the specifics of what happened
in between, but it isn't hard to fill in some of the blanks.
Nevins' girlfriend (Gossip Girl's Taylor Momsen, one of the few
professional actors in a cast recruited partly from Portland-area MySpace
profiles) pressures him into having sex for the first time, failing to notice
his reluctance to lose any more of his innocence. Her narcissism only partly
explains the oversight. Nevins plays a character who reveals no more of himself
than he has to. Talking to a detective (Daniel Liu), he remains cool and
prepared. Hanging out with a pal (Lauren McKinney) who shows the same intensity
in her concern for his well-being as in her dislike for the war in Iraq, he
reveals just enough for her to see he isn't doing well. Through simple
observation, Van Sant quietly lets viewers understand Nevins and feel the full
force of his distress. Keeping a respectful distance, the dreamily unsettling
film—stunningly shot by cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy
Li—follows Nevins from skate park to coffee shop to a home that doesn't
really feel like home anymore, drifting along with him as he makes decisions
that will shape the rest of his life, even if the present crisis passes. It's a
film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy
at their center.