Home Video: Paranoid Park

Paranoid Park
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Released March 7, 2008

I was immediately intrigued with the extremely deliberate camerawork and distinctive style of this film. Unfortunately, the intoxication faded quickly. Much like Van Sant’s previous effort “Elephant”, the film is mostly a collection of replayed shots which attempt to lend further clues to the larger picture, with little development occurring along the way. I’m all for subtlety and artsy filmmaking, yet this is another time where a brief runtime of just over 80 minutes still feels like an eternity, and not in a good way. Van Sant’s choice of Gabe Nevins as the actor to play his protagonist, keeping with his usual preference to work with unknowns, doesn’t really pay off as Nevins doesn’t seem sure of what kind of character he is playing, often bouncing back and forth between a headstrong, cocky kid with no worries to a nervous little boy incapable of fitting in with the popular kids. I understand that his transformation is part of the movie, but the character feels far too uneven. The dialogue is particularly difficult to believe, as the attempted realism results far too often in conversations that feel terribly forced and simply unreal. The plot of the movie and the journaling narration also don’t do the film any favors – a mystery that needs solving hardly belongs in such an attempt at an artistic film.

D-