The Screengrab : gabe nevins

Take Five: Van Sant

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the most curious figures in contemporary American cinema. He pioneered a very specific breed of indie filmmaking before it even had a name, but his forays into mainstream cinema have alternated between clever successes and embarrassing failures. He gives some of the oddest interviews in Hollywood (compared to him, David Lynch is a downright pedestrian chit-chatter), and he's as dedicated to constant reinvention -- or at least refinement -- as anyone in the industry. And his career would seem downright schizophrenic if it weren't so marked by intensely personal qualities; he's done everything from big, Oscar-baiting biopics (such as Milk, his take on the rise and demise of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk) to small, artsy, improvised tales with almost no commercial potential. He's equally capable of having his characters spout unadulterated Shakespeare and having them say nothing at all for endless minutes of screen time, and make both choices seem perfectly natural. He has a curiously critical eye towards his own work -- that is to say, it's not curious that he is self-critical, but rather it's curious how much he talks like a film critic; many of his longer discussions with journalists have sounded more like a well-informed film critic discussing Gus Van Sant's work than it does a director talking about himself. His stabs at mainstream credibility have yielded decidedly mixed results; his successes have been noteworthy (see below), but his failures, especially flattened-out duds like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, and an utterly pointless remake of Psycho, have been spectacular. Through it all, he's remained one of the film industry's hardest men to figure out, but it seems no one ever tires of watching what his next move will be. Here's five of our favorites by the Prince of Portland.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mala Noche was the movie that made the underground sit up and take notice of Gus Van Sant's talent; Drugstore Cowboy won over the burgeoning indie world and made him a critic's darling. But the daring, explosively risky My Own Private Idaho was the movie that convinced me that I was seeing the work of an American genius in the making. The story of two sad, sincere male hustlers (played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), it blended elements of Shakespearean drama, class warfare, transgressive queen cinema, and pure street poetry in a way that so clearly shouldn't have worked that it's downright amazing how well it did. Van Sant crammed the movie with real characters from his beloved Portland and made an intensely personal film that nonetheless hit everyone who saw it right where they lived.

TO DIE FOR (1995)

Gus Van Sant's first stab at commercial credibility was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which, despite a plethora of good intentions, was his first major dud. In fact, its ineptness in spite of itself might be noted as a pattern that the director would follow in much of his mainstream work, if it wasn't for the existence of his follow-up film, To Die For. Working from Buck Henry's sharpest, nastiest script in decades, Van Sant directs a movie that almost invisibly echoes some of the themes of his previous work, especially in those scenes featuring lovestruck, dimwitted local teen Joaquin Phoenix and his crew. Van Sant rarely overreaches, and manages to let the black comedic tone of the script do its work; his greatest accomplishment is to get a truly memorable performance out of Nicole Kidman, who's better here than she would be again for some time.

GERRY (2002)

In 2002, Van Sant was on the tail end of a bad time. Hollywood hadn't been good to him over the previous half-decade, but to be fair, he hadn't been very good to it, either, with Good Will Hunting, Psycho and Finding Forrester gunking up his resume. Returning to his strange interiors for another shot at indie filmmaking, he released the first of his "Death Trilogy", the underrated Gerry, and a lot of critics were ready to call it his fourth disaster in a row: it's static to the point of tedium, its improvised dialogue (by two actors not especially beloved by highbrow reviewers) was sometimes silly and sometimes impenetrable, and it had nothing resembling a plot. But Gerry was a quiet triumph, a movie that builds almost unnoticably and marks a return to greatness by a director who can do very much with very little.

ELEPHANT (2003)

Van Sant followed up the surprising and effective Gerry with the triumphant Elephant, the best film of 2003. The second of his death trilogy takes an almost transcendently naturalistic look at a small high school on the day of a Columbine-style murder spree; the dialogue, again largely improvised, and the endless, unintrusive tracking shots make Elephant a brilliant contradiction: a movie so banal that it's almost mystical. Through the whole event, from boring ordinariness to life-shattering violence, Van Sant's particular genius is to steadfastly refuse to lead the viewers to anything resembling an explanation for the horror. Forcing us to view everything from the eyes of those who don't understand why they have to die, Elephant reflects our own maddening desire to have random violence made explicable -- and the world's refusal to comply.

PARANOID PARK (2007)

A strangely stirring and deeply affecting film, 2007's Paranoid Park -- based largely on a successful young adult novel -- finds Gus Van Sant returning to Portland and making a key transition from the relentlessly bleak indie sensibilities of the Death Trilogy to the artsy mainstream appeal of Milk. Once again trusting an amateur cast (many of whom were recruited off of MySpace) and a good deal of improvised dialogue to carry the tone of the film, Van Sant also lays in a heavy, dark directorial touch that nails the mood of the story perfectly. He's greatly aided in this attempt by the gorgeous cinematography by Wong Kar-Wai's cameraman, Christopher Doyle, and the Zoo-York-clad Gabe Nevins as the affectless skateboarding protagonist. Paranoid Park is a perfect bridge between To Die For and Elephant.

Related Posts:

Screengrab Review: Milk

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

Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s Andrew Osborne shared with you his favorite movies from the second quarter of 2008, so I figured that I might as well get in on the act as well. Unlike Andrew, I’ll be writing about my favorite releases dating back to the beginning of the year, mostly because I didn’t write one of these back in April. But I’d like to concur with Andrew’s statement that the moviegoing year, like so many others, started slowly but quickly improved in quality as it continued, with both big-budget blockbusters and limited-release arthouse fare making strong showings thusfar.

My top five:

1. The Duchess of Langeais- had Jacques Rivette not made a film called L’Amour Fou forty years ago, he very well might have given his most recent film that title. Based on a novel by Balzac, Duchess often plays like a mirror image of The Age of Innocence- only this time, the knowledge (and flouting) of propriety only serves to drive an emotional wedge between the two lovers. The Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) and her officer (Guillaume Depardieu) must play games with each other in lieu of an actual relationship, and almost imperceptibly their innocent courtship spirals out of their control. All the while, Rivette’s formal boldness remains intact, resulting in his best film in over a decade- no mean feat for a master of Rivette’s standing.

2. WALL*E- speaking of masters, was anyone really surprised that Pixar’s latest turned out as wonderful as it did? In perhaps their most experimental gambit to date, much of WALL *E is practically dialogue-free, as director Andrew Stanton and his team make most of their points visually. And what visuals! So beautifully-rendered is the dusty Earth future of the film’s first half that the more traditionally eye-popping second half (with its interstellar mega-mall) looks almost chintzy by comparison, like all the life and heart was drained from it. Which is of course the point, as WALL*E’s message isn’t so much anti-corporate as anti-complacency, celebrating the industriousness and determination of its robotic protagonist while despairing of those who would content themselves with having their decisions made and lives lived for them.

3. Stuck- like The Duchess of Langeais, Stuart Gordon’s latest film tells the story of a man and a woman locked in a tragic, fateful duet. The difference is that this one is about a guy who gets stuck in a windshield. There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, from Gordon’s grimy visuals and grayish color palette to the behavior his film portrays, as the film’s anti-heroine (played by Mena Suvari) hides the accident victim (Stephen Rea) in her garage rather than risk jeopardizing the insignificant promotion she supposedly has coming to her. Stuck is a film born of its working-class setting, in which the poor fight over the scraps the rich give them, with little regard for the lives of those who get in their way. It’s ugly, harrowing stuff, but it’s also thrilling like the best exploitation films are, and Stuck is one of the best movies of this kind to come along in ages.

4. Paranoid Park- for years, Gus Van Sant has specialized in films about outsiders, but this is the closest he’s come thusfar to seeing the world through an outsider’s eyes. Much of the credit goes to the subjectivity inherent in Van Sant’s favored style, which he perfects with this film, as he follows a marginalized teenager (newcomer Gabe Nevins) who views his world- his parents, his peers, his girlfriend- from a distance, even before the killing he may or may not have been responsible for causes him to sever emotional ties from them altogether. He would sooner escape into his own mind as find a place for himself in this world, a point Van Sant makes most vivid in the scene where the protagonist takes a shower as the soundtrack becomes overrun with rainforest sounds. Simultaneously nightmarish and poetic, Paranoid Park is a major work by a filmmaker who remains as experimental as ever.

5. Speed Racer- yes, really. I sort of wonder if the overwhelming critical drubbing that was afforded the Wachowski Brothers’ adaptation of the animated series was due to the directors’ key inspirations- comic books, video games, Saturday morning cartoons- not being part of the critics’ pasts. Granted, I too was skeptical about the film going in, but it didn’t take long for it to win me over. I’ll be damned if I can find a subtext, but with its dazzling array of eye-popping colors, deliberately unrealistic effects, and snazzy edits (Ang Lee could take a lesson in the latter from the Wachowskis), that scarcely matters. The racetrack scenes alone gave me that rush that all big summer movies promise but which few deliver, playing like the Day-glo daydream of a Pixie Stick-fueled kid racing and smashing up Matchbox cars. Plus there are ninjas, and as any young boy can tell you, ninjas make every movie better.

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.