Gus Van Sant and "Paranoid Park": "It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Sam Adams writes in The Los Angeles Times that Gus Van Sant sees his new film, Paranoid Park, as "a transitional film, moving him once again toward the mainstream." The first thing to say about this is that, compared to the so-called "Death Trilogy" of films that Van Sant has made since 2002 (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days) while under the influence of director Bela Tarr, he may be right. The second thing is that Van Sant's notion of the mainstream and Michael Bay's may barely be on speaking terms. It's not clear that it has all that much in common with the Van Sant of Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester, either. The new movie differs from his other recent work in that it had an honest-to-goodness script (based on Blake Nelson's young adult novel). But as Mike D'Angelo noted here recently, it has many of the trademarks of Van Sant's forays into experimental filmmaking: nonlinear storytelling, long, long takes, even oddball music choices. The teenage skateboarder hero, who is carrying a secret that's killing him inside, strolls down a high school corridor on his way to a sit-down meeting with a police detective as Billy Swan's lovably woozy "I Can Help" ("It would sure do me good/ To do you good") wobbles on the soundtrack.

Back in the late 1980s, Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy made Van Sant the great hope of the indie movement before the movement itself really had a star system and an identity. After the ambitious My Own Private Idaho, his adaptation of Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues turned out to be the kind of disastrous conflagration that can turn a filmmaker's reputation to ash in one puff. Even those who thought the director needed to re-invent himself were surprised at how thoroughly he dug in as a Hollywood pro, first with the commercial-indie black comedy To Die For and then with Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester. If Van Sant sees these kinds of films as marking distinct stages in his career — he has said that with the Death Trilogy and Paranoid Park he has reached "the end of a certain way I was making films" — he's always worked hard at doing the best job he can and is fluid in his notions of what collaborators belong on which projects. Harris Savides, his cinematographer on Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, first teamed up with him on Finding Forrester. Now they're working together on his next movie, Milk, starring Sean Penn as the martyred, openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, a large-scale period drama that will give the director the chance to recreate San Francisco in the 1970s, in the first full glow of gay liberation — what Van Sant himself describes as "the creation of a gay class of people, from nothing, or from a subclass that was below the surface." The new project, the realization of a long term dream of Van Sant's, returns him to the general subject of Elephant, et al. — death in the public sphere — with a "more conventional" storytelling approach, but for Van Sant, conventionality remains something with which he has to make his uneasy peace. "You can never really get there," he says of such concepts as "the real" Harvey Milk, "So you might as well have an analogy rather than a biographical depiction."

Screengrab Review: Paranoid Park

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Review by Mike D'Angelo.

Taking a brief and very welcome break from memorial filmmaking — Columbine, Kurt Cobain, a forthcoming Harvey Milk biopic — Gus Van Sant achieves thrilling new heights of lyrical expressionism with Paranoid Park, his fractured adaptation of a young-adult novel by Blake Nelson. Frankly, I was so certain that I never wanted to see this particular director set foot on a high-school campus again that I contemplated a restraining order. But this brilliantly schizoid character study — structured as the letter-cum-journal entry of Alex, a skate punk with a guilty conscience (sensational newcomer Gabe Nevins, found via MySpace) — digs into the teenage mindset with a clarity and eloquence that Elephant, with its distracting (and, to my mind, obscene) echoes of real-world tragedy, couldn't possibly achieve. Ostensibly, the plot concerns Alex's involvement in the accidental death of a security guard. But since this act of involuntary manslaughter (briefly seen in gruesome detail) is wholly fictional, Van Sant and Nelson's appropriation of it as an overarching metaphor for the furtive, free-floating sense of shame that accompanies puberty feels bold and incisive rather than deeply disrespectful.

Meanwhile, Van Sant's formal dexterity just grows more and more astounding. He sometimes rivals Alain Resnais here with his conflation of editing and memory, skipping back and forth in time in a dissociative frenzy that has no use for conventional signposts or explanations. And even when Van Sant flirts with cliché, he does so in a way that's forbidding and strange: You've seen the scene where the distraught protagonist sublimates his/her grief in the shower a hundred times — but never like this, with the contrast cranked up to near-abstraction and the camera intently focused on the rivulets of water that flow from Alex's long hair as he stands silently, head bowed. I could have done with a bit less emphasis on Elliott Smith on the soundtrack, perhaps, but the film's other musical choices, ranging from Billy Swan's "I Can Help" to snatches of Nino Rota's score for Juliet of the Spirits, are magnificently contrapuntal. This is still very much a mood piece, but Van Sant, after two consecutive films centered on sacrificial lambs, has made an overdue and welcome return to recognizable human beings.

The Screengrab : blake nelson

Gus Van Sant and "Paranoid Park": "It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films"

Screengrab Review: Paranoid Park