Paranoid Park

Remember checking out books from the school library, sometime before high school when going to libraries still meant something, and finding what you consider the perfect book to spend the next week with? These were never important works of literature or even anything that delved deeply into the human soul but it was something you were interested in and sometimes these stories hid deeper truths about something you were experiencing. This is exactly how Paranoid Park is. It helps that it is based on a Young Adult novel but writer/direct Gus Van Sant has taken something that is on the surface a fairly basic story and turned into something a bit deeper and with a little more resonance.

I guess you could call this an expansion of Van Sants "Death Trilogy" (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days) since this is still a story line based around a passing. The film also features long, laborious takes in slow motion but Van Sant has sort of melded his more European aesthetic (I call it European because I can't think of another description to the almost plot less, minimal films he has been making) with his early film about street punks and hustlers. He seems to take all of his cinematic tricks he has learned throughout his career and throw them into this picture, even using not one, but two Elliot Smith songs on the soundtrack. And like the trilogy before it, there is a dreamlike presence, almost as if the central character is asleep as he walks through his life, dealing with the terrible accident he has been a part of.

Van Sant tends to cast young non-professionals who seem natural and a bit stiff, relaxed and guarded at the same time. He captures the inexperience of real adolescents, who are many times way over their heads, even if they aren't aware of it. There is not on recognizable name or face in the cast and the film better for it. The teenagers sound like teenagers and the parents come across just as confused as the kids.

The main problem with this film is that like his other three films of the trilogy, Paranoid Park is good but you don't really want to see it again. While this is the most accessible of the group (and the shortest at just under 80 minutes) it can still border on becoming tiresome to someone who is not a fan of this kind of film, I just happen to be one.