Film

In many ways, Paranoid Park takes Van Sant back to his origins. He’s in his native Portland, Oregon, focusing—as he did in Mala Noche and My Own Private Idaho—on a teenage boy in trouble. With dreamy, handheld-camera work, Van Sant gets inside the mind of skateboarder Alex (Nevins). As Alex unfolds his story via notebook in jumbled chronology, we get the sense that he is circling around some trauma that he would rather not face. Fairly early in the film, a police detective (Liu) turns up at Alex’s school asking questions about the titular skate park, near which a railroad security guard has been killed and someone has thrown a skateboard in the river. Though Alex withholds the key scene for a while, Van Sant doesn’t play this for suspense in the usual sense. Instead, Van Sant explores the workings of Alex’s mind as he tries to come to terms with what has happened.

Van Sant uses long takes and handheld camera to remarkable effect. Some critics complain that he is simply ripping off long-take master Béla Tarr, but Van Sant has absorbed Tarr’s influence and uses it to his own ends. Despite a brief foray into big-budget film, Van Sant remains what he was when he started: a film artist who is at his best when working low to the ground.