Movie Review: Paranoid Park

Ten years ago, Gus Van Sant tried an experiment. He wanted to reproduce Psycho, the Hitchcock classic, shot for shot. He made two changes that would affect how close the copy matched the original. First, he obviously picked different actors. He instructed the actors to give their own interpretation. He didn't want them to mimic the exact performance of the original. Second, he shot in color.

Most critics felt the remake was unnecessary. When movies value originality, copying the original seems less an homage than a pale imitation. Consider how often plays are done and redone, or how music performances, like the New World Symphony are also played again and again. Each time, the actors can provide their nuances and perhaps produce a performance even greater than the original.

However, in film, the original seems like family. No matter how much someone might act like a family member, they aren't the same.

One interesting criticism, made of Van Sant, was as a director. Hitchcock was famous for having a love-hate relationship with his blond actresses. He both loved and yet resented them, and this, an interviewer suggested, came across in his films. Van Sant is gay, and the interviewer suggested that he didn't have that same sensibility, and so lost something in the translation.

Van Sant's sexuality comes across in his films, though typically, not in any overt way. Originally tapped to make Brokeback Mountain before the job eventually fell to Ang Lee, it makes you wonder how Van Sant's interpretation would have gone. Van Sant has taken some detours into ordinary film-making. As entertaining as Good Will Hunting was, it was not a particularly Van Sant film. Neither was the mostly forgettable Finding Forrester.

Van Sant wanted to go back to his roots as an avant-garde filmmaker, stretching the language of film. This includes the series of films: Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and his latest, Paranoid Park.

I've seen both Gerry anf Elephant but have yet to see Last Days. To watch these films is to see film as something besides conventional plot and conventional characters.

Gerry stars Casey Affleck and Matt Damon, who decide to go out into the desert, and promptly get lost. Much of the film is about them wandering, in a kind of hell, with no real chance of escape. It's as much watching their hypnotic movements as it is trying to understand what the film is all about. His ability to cast Affleck and Damon must have come from directing Good Will Hunting and their willingness to act in the film allowed it, I suspect, to be made at all.

Elephant had a little more of a storyline, given that Gerry pretty much had none. It follows several teens, on a day, very much like Columbine. Critics have complained that the incident was still too raw to film, and that his formalist tendencies was a bit insulting to a real event. There are some odd comic moments, in particular, one characters drunk dad, which gives a kind of levity at the end of the film that is very out of place.

Van Sant offers no answers to why things happened. He posits all sorts of theory. The kids watch some documentary about Nazi Germany. The two teens kiss one another and shower with one another on the fateful day. A kid seems to hear something while at lunch.

Perhaps Van Sant's sexuality explains why he generally doesn't have such developed women characters (not that his characters are terribly developed). He seems to view women as shallow. There is the gawky teen girl which guys don't seem to like. There is the cheerleader types that puke their lunch so they won't get fat.

Paranoid Park is perhaps the best of the teenage angst films. Newcomer Gabe Nevins plays Alex, a skateboarder that is questioned about the possible murder of a security guard. Van Sant pretty much casts unknowns for this.

The film is more about memory, visual surfaces. When most people who watch films concern themselves with figuring out what the plot is, Van Sant almost wants you to watch the surfaces, to create this sense-memory, as he weaves events non-linearly. Working with former Wong Kar-Wai collaborator, cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, Van Sant produces images of crystal clearness, alternating with the haze of low quality digital.

Mike D'Angelo points out a key scene, where Alex is taking a shower, the kind that is often shown when the main character is dealing with some kind of traumatic incident, and yet it's filmed so that you stop paying attention to Alex's problems and stare at the visual oddity, his silhouette in black, with water running down his lengthy hair.

Van Sant repeats his favorite motif, as he follows his characters either from behind or just ahead, and have them walking at least a minute to their destinations. He freezes on close-ups of the Asian-American detective, and Alex, letting the audience figure out what is meant. Does the detective sense that Alex has done something? Or more importantly, since Van Sant is gay, does the detective have something for this kid? He plays a similar scene with a friend of Alex staring at Alex.

Van Sant's not so interested in a plot as he in trying to reproduce the turmoil and detached actions of Alex. By selecting non-actors, he can have everyone underplay what they do. By that, imagine American Idol with folk singers who have deliberately tried to remove all affectation.

Despite his push for naturalism, the main incident, when shown on the screen, is at such bizarre counterpoint to the naturalism, that it seems both shocking, and yet, hardly real.

And, as that interviewer points out how Hitchcock's relation to blondes informed his filmmaking, there is a sense that Van Sant is staring at Nevins. He removes his shirt, his boxers peak out, but all handled perfectly naturalistic, despite the fact it's a film, and therefore is all but natural.

Van Sant takes a more honest conclusion, even if Alex seems oddly detached from what he's done. The closing scenes suggest something about film and creativity, rather than Alex's personal situation.

The film was marred by an audience member, sitting to my right and ahead of me, sighing as if he couldn't fathom what was going on, and was uttering his disapproval. It's not a film for everyone, but has Van Sant at the top of his game.

I'd rate this an A-.