Moving away from the clinical distance that granted us a hands off approach to his recently finished Death Trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days), Van Sant literally takes a step closer to his worn themes of guilt, anxiety, and adolescent angst in Paranoid Park. At times dropping his 35mm camera for tight Super 8 shots of kids floating on skateboards around a downtown Portland skate park, Paranoid Park is a claustrophobic spin on coming of age in a day littered by South Park and Napoleon Dynamite references.


An adaptation of the Blake Nelson novel by the same name, the film centers on a skate park in downtown Portland. An historic haunt for homeless people, street kids, and assorted disaffected youth, Paranoid Park in Van Sant’s film is both a place of transience and a moment frozen in time, the last stand of adolescence exerting itself in the ballet of skaters paced by otherworldly Nina Rota soundtracks from Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Amarcord. The story follows Alex, who is being questioned in the murder of a railway guard close to the skate park. His response to the questioning suggests he was involved with the death as the film skips from past to present, doubles back to retrace its own steps, and swaps Alex’s stilted voiceover for slow motion pans across his daily routine. The film splinters as a painful memory unwilling to be recognized, and Alex moves numbly through Van Sant’s nonlinear structure until we encounter the railway guard’s graphically broken body, Beethoven’s 9th looming in the background.


No stranger to working with non-professionals, Van Sant cast the film through a MySpace call. Alex’s performance in particular is immediately awkward and naïve. But as the story unfolds and we hear Nina Rota, Elliot Smith, Billy Swann, Ethan Rose, and others in the background balancing out the clumsy dialogue, it is as if Van Sant is letting others speak for Alex, lending him a gravity he is incapable of achieving. And ultimately, this is what Paranoid Park is about. Alex struggles to find ways to articulate his sense of trauma, and finds nothing to turn to but the empty appeal of Paranoid Park. Some may find the film a repetitive exercise, as it covers much of the same ground as Elephant. But Van Sant’s careful posture in the film, weaving the mature soundtrack with an inarticulate first person, will appeal to those who have been in the past lulled by his hypnotic connections between pop culture and personal loss.