Paranoid Park (2007) Synopsis:
The story revolves around a teenage skateboarder who accidentantly kills a security guard. His otherwise typical life spins into a strange new reality of confusion, cover-up and guilt.
Paranoid Park (2007) Movie Review:
“Paranoid Park” isn’t about a murder. It’s a tone poem about the effects of a murder. The milieu is the infamous Portland skate park named “Paranoid Park” while the characters that inhabit this park are as empty as their recently toked sk8ter boi bongs. The principal is a floppy haired muppet of a lad that looks like the chick from “Maria Full of Grace” yet has the personality of a brick wall—he is similar to another famously stoic killer, Meursault from Camus’ “The Stranger,” only not nearly as lively. Under the assumption that a dumb-ass skater teen did it, detectives follow the clues to a local high school and investigate. Thus, as the plot synopsis goes, the film guides our “young skater into a moral odyssey where he must not only deal with the pain and disconnect of adolescence but the consequences of his own actions." Gee, that actually makes "Paranoid Park" sound like a real movie while the grim reality is that I'm not sure what this is. It’s trying to be, what, a reflective film journal? An urban homage to David Gordon Green’s “George Washington” on skates? “Lords of Dogtown” meets “Days of Heaven?” What?!
If pressed I would wager that this is a minimalist morality tail or contemplation piece in which the lead (a vacant Gabe Nevins: cast for no other reason than his vacancy) is involved in that pesky accidental murder of a railroad security guard one dark and broody night. Through flashbacks and wonky time ellipses the character spends the rest of the film... um, perhaps feeling guilt over what happened. I honestly wouldn’t know because the performances are so bad (the cast makes soldiers in “Redacted” look like theater vets). But even if they were up to task director Gus Van Sant must be faulted for failing to penetrate, from either inside or afar, the mind of the teenage dummy. Instead, the filmmaker fetishizes the featureless features and philosophical beingness of a “beautiful” young man. Those not as smitten with the underaged boy’s face are dropped at distance as this murderous aura of moment-in-time-ness takes its toll on the young skater's psyche. And ours too.
Probing the teenage mind makes for a great, worthy premise to a film. Truffaut did it best but after “Elephant” I cannot deny that Van Sant is also a master of wordless poignancies. In the confines of this park however the only thing the post-Hollywood/nuvo-auteur masters is wordless meanderings and the tedious desire to relish in past tense meanings. The film is dreadfully dull; anyone reading this should know that I adore the director’s “Last Days” and worship his “Gerry” so don't be thinking I'm one of those viewers who has no tolerance for anti-Hollywood expressions depicting teens growing up. Unlike those artistically successful films, “Paranoid Park” is not art; it's a mistake. A window gazing trip into an abyss of open bracketed angsty nothingness. A film that, at seventy-something minutes, is STILL too long and indulgent.
Now that this much buzzed over (in French cinephille circles at least) film has been released in America there is bound to be an audience, however marginal, that gets what Van Sant is after on this project. Good for them. I also “get” what he's trying to do even though I could never bring myself to buy into his arty masturbation verses. Here is a film that tested, then exhausted, then finally snapped my resolve. “Paranoid Park” is ultimately too evasive and mediated to be appreciated by me on any significant level. There are passages where cops stair at kids and kids stair at other kids while one kid can only stair off into space. As for me: I'm staring at my watch.
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Paranoid Park (2007) review written by: Greg Douglass
6th October, 2008 
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