This review was originally published March 7th, 2008.

The films of Gus Van Sant are an acquired taste. At times slow and hypnotic, graphic and draining, his body of work is unlike that of any other young filmmaker. His new film, Paranoid Park, received the 60th Anniversary Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and is an aching microcosm of the current teen culture that explores a story on multiple levels, always succeeding.

The immediate story is deceptively simple. A railroad security guard is killed in the middle of the night. A skateboard is found in the lake nearby and the “skateboard community” of the local high school is questioned, one being Alex, a quiet young man who admits to believing in “something outside of life … different levels of stuff.” On the night of the murder, Alex was skating at Paranoid Park, a skatepark on the East side of Portland. The story of his involvement is told by him in voiceover as he recounts it on paper.

It sounds simple enough, but Paranoid Park is more about what is going on inside characters than outside. Alex walks the streets of Portland like a zombie, saying little and smiling even less. His actions are intercut with grainy Super 8 images of skateboarders braving their perilous craft on the streets of the city and the ramps of the skatepark. It’s a beautiful metaphor for what is going on inside Alex even before the crime has taken place.

Van Sant partially abandons his Bela Tarr-inspired long takes, but still spends plenty of time focusing on the faces of characters enough for the audience to sense what is going on inside. A shot comes to mind of Alex walking down the street trying to talk himself out of something verbally while his thoughts scream at him to do the opposite. Alex and the rest of the young characters seem to be understood by no one, sometimes not even themselves. They are consistently restless, unsatisfied, living in a treacherous world where the horrifying reality of death lies in wait.

The film is led by a teenage cast and at times the performances are very deep and revealing. Gabe Nevins’ portrayal of Alex is extremely layered and, while fantastic on screen, his voiceover feels very flat, much like he is reading a math textbook. Is this what Van Sant intended? It would seem that something so obvious would be noticed and changed if it wasn’t the director’s vision. It is hard to leave one of Van Sant’s films without a resounding “WHY?” in at least one area and Paranoid Park’s voiceover is the recipient of that question this time around.

Voiceover aside, Paranoid Park is extremely thought-provoking in its portrayal of adults as either uncaring, distant forces or in-your-face, “I’m-just-like-you” fakers. In light of a pending divorce, Alex lives with his mother whose face is never seen. Many other adults are out of focus for the entire run time. Early in the film, Alex is interrogated by a police detective and, in trying to make Alex more comfortable, the detective tries to identify with him by saying things like, “I did that when I was a teenager.” It’s easy to tell that Alex sees right through him.

The crux of Paranoid Park is the weighty burden of keeping things inside for lack of meaningful connection with other people. The film is filled with the aches, pains, longing, and sadness of trying to find other people with whom to share secrets, but being blocked at every turn. Watching the film, I was reminded of a quote prefacing Stephen King’s short story The Body, a work that also concerns young people. King gets at the root of Van Sant’s film better than my simple words ever could:

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to where your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure that your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked up within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.