Paranoid Park

It is a pre requisite for any Gus Van Sant film to be intimately beautiful, sensitively shot and directed, and to deal with subjects like death with consideration and feeling.

Teaming up with the much feted cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, proves something of a masterstroke, as Van Sant’s eye for lush, expansive cinema is pushed and finished with a flourish by Doyle in a beauteous collage of Super 8 skate footage and sultry, sweeping 35mm.

Based on the Blake Nelson novel of the same name, it tracks the life of Alex (Gabe Nevins), a troubled skateboard loving teen, caught under the grey cloud of adolescence. The weight of the world seemingly hangs on Alex’s shoulders with even the most trivial of pubescent tribulations demanding intense procrastination. Already struggling with Jennifer (Taylor Momsen), his pushy girlfriend, Alex, in an attempt to establish himself as a young adult, concocts a plan with a friend to sneak to skate park Paranoid Park for a late night skating session. After accepting an older skater’s offer to ‘come ride the rails’, this inevitably leads to disaster, climaxing in the accidental, grisly death of a security guard, further adding to his woes.

Struggling with guilt, Alex strives for solace, seeking it in his own quietly desperate solitude. Guarded and aloof, he becomes almost muted in his words and actions, emanating a personal sadness, one that Van Sant slowly, poignantly elaborates. Sliding in a brief, half-hearted foray onto the touchy subject of the Iraq war in cinema – Alex’s apathetic discussion with Macy (Lauren Mckinney) – the pressures of teenage sex, and finding your own identity, Van Sant ticks all the necessary boxes to make the audience believe Alex is just like any other teen.

At the suggestion of Macy, Alex begins to write a diary, cataloguing his inner thoughts and the events that preceded them. This then takes on the form of the film’s disparate narrative where non-linear events gradually come together to paint an austere picture of one teen’s bleak foray into adulthood.

Released on 28th April 2008 by Tartan.

Written by Reef Younis.