Paranoid Park: Portland’s notorious skate boarding underground hangout where soft hearted skateboarder, Alex (Gabe Nevins), looks to fit in among the spot’s tough and intriguing crowd. With his parents divorcing, his friends distant and distracted, and his girlfriend most terribly domineering, Alex decides to take a train ride with a skater he meets at the park and gets himself tangled in the death of a security guard along the rails. When the police show up at Alex’s school to interrogate its skaters, Alex is forced to confront the sights he’s repressed and battle his conscience over whether or not he should confess.
Director Gus Van Sant adapted Paranoid Park’s screenplay from Blake Nelson’s like-titled novel, but while the book is from the young adult genre, Van Sant’s movie version doesn’t come close to breaking through to the heart of adolescence. The dialogue is ridiculous, hardly typical to teenagers, and thus inescapably unbelievable. Worst are Alex’s exchanges with his stiff and awkward parents; the conversations he has with his friends aren’t much better. The kids like to reference the silly things ‘grownups’ do and the way they talk about sex and skateboarding is straight from an estranged middle age perspective. I can’t believe more careful attention wasn’t paid to the revisions of this screenplay because nearly half of the very little dialogue utilized in the film seems to float on a cloud of complete crap.
There is a bit of beauty in this movie. Though its palate is primarily dark, the film’s contrast of color is captivating and its skateboarding sequences are really awe inspiring to watch. I’m not a big fan of Van Sant’s shooting style; his signature ‘long walk’ scenes are boring especially because his prime subject, Nevins, is a rather stone faced and uninteresting subject. Though its overall cinematography bored me to picking my fingernails and its sappy dialogue had me retching, Paranoid Park just might be worth watching for its pretty horrific death scene, complete with the severed security guard dragging his torso and trailing his entrails off the train tracks before his last breath.
A couple second act scenes are really well done, and some of the performances (namely Taylor Momsen’s as Alex’s girlfriend Jennifer) are great, but when it comes down to it Paranoid Park is ultimately unfulfilling. Its end is cheap and unsuggestive and its premise isn’t all that profound; I thought I would get more out of this flick than a renewed appreciation for skateboard tricks.
