Hardly a walk in the park, this powerful journey is one of Van Sant’s darkest. Grips the viewer in a vice of guilt that gets tighter to the point of strangulation. A dark and gripping masterpiece
Oscar nominated director Gus Van San (“Good Will Hunting”—1997) has come up with another corker in his long line of stories about how it sucks to be a teenager. Alex (Gabe Nevins) and his friend Jared (Jake Miller) take a chance and travel to a local skateboard park to check out the action. But this is no ordinary skateboard park; this is the grittiest, dirtiest, grungiest, heavy rock freeway underpass chain link fence homeless kid park in the entire free world. And probably the unfree world as well. It was built by the ‘boarders themselves and they named it Paranoid Park.
As Alex says, “I’m not ready for Paranoid Park. But then, nobody is ready for Paranoid Park.”
This is the sort of off pretzel logic that pervades the film from start to finish. The off-kilter nature of the adolescent experience is impressed into the audience by the awesome mixture of Super 8 filming with the more standard 35 mm format. The Super 8 shots, frequently handheld and jittery, are of the ‘boarders themselves and the netherworld around them. It is extremely grainy and blurry, confusing the line between the real, adult, world and this thrown together exercise yard that many of the kids call home.
The kids are not there because they want to be. It is their refuge, and adults think twice before coming anywhere near. Even the cops keep their distance. That is, until a gruesome death occurs in the nearby train yards. Amidst the finely ground grit and grease of the blackened track and lumbering engines a life is ended. In more ways than one. The death itself is shown in pitiless graphic detail, the horror of the mutilation exaggerated by the grey darkness and squealing rail sounds of the train tracks by Paranoid Park.
A group of skateboarders is implicated in the gruesome death of the security guard in the yard. What follows is as much an exploration of the solitary sentence of the perp as it is the guilt and hopelessness of living with a sin.
As in Van Sant’s previous indie sleeper “Elephant,” the story is told through “Rashomon” style flashbacks and voice-overs. There is a journal involved and the kids are frequently wise far beyond their years. The grainy images mark the transition from the rational to the emotional with such profundity that by the end of the movie we get dizzy the moment the Super 8 starts, without even seeing the rest of the shot.
These kids are largely abandoned by their parents who are either too much like them, or too much not like them to be of any help. Detective Lu (Daniel Liu), investigating the murder, is more of a parent to the kids than anyone else in the film. The teachers in the school are made to look worse than hopeless, they are like trained rats compared to the teenagers.
Having said that, the film is not about kids being smart and adults dumb. It is about the inherent alienation of being an adolescent and the extreme effects of such isolation in an environment of guilt. As the guilt grows, with no outlet or confession, everything else is slowly throttled. At this point the lesson is universal---it applies to adults as well.
Exemplary performances by all of the amateur, inexperienced players. Daniel Liu does a first rate job as the x-ray vision detective who sees through the kids but, like all of the adults, is helpless to get them out of their psychological solitary confinement. John Michael Burrows, as the security guard, pulls off a tremendous effort. Short but powerful; his depiction of the horribly mutilated victim of an accidental blow aimed in self defense is a monument to the director’s savvy.
Although about kids, the film is actually aimed at adults. It shows grown-ups about themselves from the objective view of adolescents. The R rating is for real, which is unfortunate because it is probably due to only the death sequence. There is a lot more in the film that is worth seeing. On the other hand, maybe teenagers know most of it, already.
MPAA: Rated R for some disturbing images, language and sexual content
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