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Director: Gus Van Sant

Cast: Gabe Nevins, Daniel Liu, Taylor Momsen, Jake Miller, Lauren McKinney, Winfield Jackson, Joe Schweitzer, Grace Carter, Jay ‘Smay’ Williamson, Dillon Hines.

Runtime: 90mins

One of the Characters says to Alex (Gabe Nevins), “No One’s ever really ready for Paranoid Park“.

Have you been in the ‘wrong place, wrong time’ and ended up doing something drastic and the feeling of guilt destroying you from the inside. That’s exactly what the main protagonist Alex goes through in this Gus Van Sant film.

Based on Blake Nelson’s novel by the same name, it follows 16-year-old skateboarder Alex, who accidentally kills a security guard outside Paranoid Park, Portland’s most infamous skateboarding locale. When he decides not to tell anyone, he takes on a crushing burden of guilt.

Many people have been comparing this movie with Elephant, Gus Van Sant movie which won the Palme d’or in 2003. Paranoid Park is more about the characters than the story itself. Mostly teenagers recruited from MySpace, most of them having given performances which hints about their own lives in reality. Unlike other teen movies, the children here do not seem angry, overly rebellious, or addicted to sex and drugs and rock and roll. Nor are they stupid. They are convincingly normal teenagers, very real. They could even be your children.

Most of the happenings at Paranoid Park are given through a mental narrative by Alex. Long displays of skate board skills might seem boring, but rather its the editing, background music and inventive use of cameras and formats that is quite appealing. We see and feel how this hobby, through the skaters’ eyes, produces exposure to drugs or music. By making Alex’s perspective so real for us, the director makes us think like Alex. We are closer to him than the adults in his world. When Alex is talking to his mother or father, they stay out of focus or out of frame for quite a long time into the conversation, thats because adults have been sidelined and are meant not to be interesting. Another instance is Macy tells Alex to write the whole incident as a book or as a journal and send it to someone other than his parents and she tells him to send it to her. Even after the mystery and the incident is revealed, the movie goes on to show what Alex is going through and how he deals with it.

Cinematography is by Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love). The sun through blades of grass near the shore and the shots between Super 8, 35mm and hand-held cameras has a very moist feel to it. All the slow motion, dreamy effects and the blurry, recurrent skateboarding sequences are visually beautiful and it got a flowing movement with it. The Background score is good and is very diverse from slow melancholy to hard rock.

This film is different, unique but similar in structure to his last few films. Paranoid Park will certainly find its audience with those who don’t require a well-crafted narrative to enjoy a film.