Van Sant's Paranoid Park Offers a Fresh Take on Teenage Drama

At first blush, Gus Van Sant’s newest film seems a lot like an extended M83 music video. Paranoid Park explores a Portland skateboarding community in the aftermath of grisly tragedy, with skate scenes shot on Super-8 against a backdrop of dreamy French ambient pop. They’re beautiful, haunting, and firmly rooted in the age demographic they portray. And that may be the most impressive thing about Paranoid Park—Van Sant’s restraint in working with the high-school-age material he’s chosen as his subject.

Adapted from a young adult novel by Blake Nelson, the R-rated film version of Paranoid Park automatically precludes the book’s target audience from seeing Nelson’s work on the screen. How, then, to present the story of Alex (played by Gabe Nevins), a 16-year-old skateboarder on the periphery of the “tough” group of skaters who pass the time at Paranoid Park? Alex’s life is fairly average—he admires the crowd of hard-core skaters that hangs out in Paranoid Park, treats his parents respectfully (but lies to them when he needs to), and isn’t really sure why he’s with his girlfriend, Jennifer (Gossip Girl’s Taylor Momsen), who is inexplicably obsessed with losing her virginity.

The synopsis offered in press materials for the film simply says the following: “Alex, a teenage skateboarder, accidentally kills a security guard in the vicinity of Paranoid Park, Portland’s tough skate park. He decides to say nothing.” The brevity of the statement accurately reflects how Van Sant handles his material—a careful, intelligent refusal to comment. It would have been easy for a lesser director to go one of two routes in staging Alex’s story for an adult audience—either condescending to his teenage subjects, painting an adolescent-apocalypse tale of high-school vice, or overly empathizing with them, a move that too often rings false when a mature director is at a film’s helm. That Van Sant manages to avoid both pitfalls is a testament to his remarkable technical control.

It’s nothing we haven’t seen from Van Sant before, of course. Paranoid Park instantly calls Elephant to mind in its lack of commentary, implicit or explicit, on the morality of its characters’ actions. This is not to say, though, that Paranoid Park doesn’t represent growth on Van Sant’s part. While the director shot Elephant in an aggressively objective style, offering little to no assessment of its characters’ motivations, Paranoid Park focuses entirely on Alex’s very personal distress, the symptoms of which the audience observes even before it’s revealed whether he actually had a hand in the guard’s death.

The moments of levity in Paranoid Park are rare—understandable, given the subject—but reveal much about the film’s conventions. After Alex and Jennifer finally have sex, she immediately rushes to the bathroom to have a loud, giggly cell phone conversation (to which both Alex and the audience are privy) about how great it was. And when the skate crowd is called into the principal’s office, their defiant posturing as they travel down the hallway—a force in numbers—is funny precisely because it’s endearing. In both cases, the audience smiles because Van Sant (in the latter case, with the aid of brilliant cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li) has found a fresh riff on the high school experience, purer than the tropes we see in every teen comedy. Alex’s ennui feels like new ennui.