Paranoid Park (2007) by Gus Van Sant; Ratings: 4 & 1/2 in 5

"Dude, I don’t think I’m ready for Paranoid Park.”

“Hey, nobody is ever ready for Paranoid Park.”
                                        -----PARANOID PARK, GUS VAN SANT.

If you are expecting plot, suspense, story, conclusion, analysis, curious dialogues, don’t ever watch Gus Van Sant. He eschews all narrative conventions that he thinks are redundant, and what remains is purely, dazzlingly cinematic. His recent movies ( “Gerry”, “Elephant”, “Last Days”, “Paranoid Park”) are pure cinemas, and cinemas that are unmistakably his own. America has seldom seen such a strong auteur film-maker in recent years, and it pays far less attention to his genius than what he deserves. Van Sant started as a major member of the Queer Cinema movement (“Drugstore Cowboys”, “My Private Idaho”), then had a brief and eventful foray at Hollywood, where he made one Oscar-winning film (Good Will Hunting), and managed to make an absolute shot-by-shot, angle-by-angle remake of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” that proved to be the most mordant joke anyone ever cracked at Hollywood’s practice of making remakes and so-called ‘adaptations’ (the studios and majority of the critics did not enjoy the joke at all; people with power are exceptionally touchy about their skins!). Predictably, Hollywood threw him out after that. What followed is the second phase of Van Sant’s film-making; taking a little something-s from a diverse array of influences ranging from Tarkovsky, Belá Tarr to Cinema Verité documentaries, he created a style permanently his own. His ‘Death’ trilogy (“Gerry”, “Elephant”, and “Last Days”) has been one of the major cinematic discoveries of the last decade. “Elephant” won the Palm d’Or at Cannes [for details, check the review of this film published on this blog]. “Paranoid Park”, written (loosely based on a novel), directed and edited by Gus Van Sant, is a companion-piece to “Elephant”. It has won the 60th Anniversary Award at 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Although not as overwhelming and major as “Elephant”, it is still a small, beautiful, and original film that almost forces its viewers into a hallucinating, tranquil trance.

“Paranoid Park” is visually stunning, and I am understating here. It has the barest minimum of a plot: in Portland, Oregon, a teenager, called Alex (played by Gabe Nevins), goes to a skateboard park called the “Paranoid Park” (which is the Mecca for all Portland skateboarders), meets a freight-train-hopping guy called ‘scratch’, takes a ride on a freight train, when a security guard intervenes, he hits him with the skateboard, which causes the guard to fall under a train and die. Coming from a troubled family where the parents are in the process of getting divorced, Alex faces his first existential problem: guilt. The film only studies that and nothing else (Police does come to know about it, but they never zero in on Alex; in fact, the police angle is only perfunctory). No one gets caught; no one comes to know about it, no catharsis, no conclusion. It uses real-life non-actor teenagers who really, for once, sound like teenagers. Dialogues are sparse: cinema talks through images. Alex goes through his voice-overs as if he is reading his creative writing project in front of a classroom, while he is actually expressing the innermost crisis of his life. Nowadays, many films use hop-scotch chronology and fragmented narratives just as a trendy fashion style (the Bourne films and “Crash” would be a good example); it makes the film look better than what it truly is. “Paranoid Park” is not one of those; its fragmentary and elliptical nature is the direct consequence of how Alex deals with his inner crisis: he sways and wavers, like the motion of a skateboard, facts and impressions come out in bits and pieces. Reminiscent of “Elephant”, Alex walks down the school corridors that look severely antiseptic with a lost look as if he is under a coral reef scuba-diving. In fact, the whole teenage experience in Van Sant’s films has the feel of an underwater life, ---- an original ambience of alienation I find subtle and breathtaking. Van Sant has a sympathy for these young men that transcends the boundaries of the teenager archetype, and gets him across the very dangerous waters (infested with squirming archetypes) of the teen-flick genre. He finds an unconceivable amount of depth within teenage boys who still wear elastic friendship bands!
Skateboarding is the major metaphor here; it is the teenage mimicry of the adult world. Throughout the film, we see various skateboarders performing tricks in front of an 8mm handheld camera: they are practicing the next, big steps. To the urban, cosmopolitan teenagers of Van Sant’s movie, adulthood is ‘high’, it’s ‘cool, dude’, its ‘paranoia’. There is an amazing sequence in the film that frames this with quaint humor. A police officer (played by Daniel Liu) talks to the skateboarders of Alex’s school to learn about the ‘skateboard’ community that hangs around the Paranoid Park. The officer repeatedly refers to it as the ‘skateboard park’ while the students rectify his mistake: it is “PARANOID PARK”. What looks like skateboarding to adults is in reality a paranoid ritual, the hyper-active, hyper-alienated oscillating mimicry of the futility of life. No one is ready for the Paranoid Park; life always shocks. The cool alienation of the teenagers is so intense and profound it might give you a chill. Van Sant’s world-view closely resembles that of Jean Baudrillard (at least I think so); he is one of the very, very few film-makers who can really feel the pulse of the post-modern situation. “Paranoid Park” is a landscape of the post-modern teenage alienation.

The film can be read in other ways as well; it alludes to the train-hopping generations of the old Great Depression days, it discourses on certain sexual politics. By being slow and introspective and by avoiding conclusive scenarios, it leaves a discursive space for the viewers, a time-&-space that enables us to think freely. There are many viewers who prefer a definitive and conclusive story instead; they should not feel proud of that, -- aesthetic backwardness, gullibility and pseudo-innocence are not virtues.

However, this is neither a prefect film nor a great one. There are hitches; the gory train accident scenario looks out of place, as if someone is trying to insert a Takashi Miike film within one by Ingmar Bergman. Despite its non-cathartic staunchness, the end effect feels a little too small, little too tame. It does not pack a hefty punch the way “Elephant” did. But then, small things have their own intrinsic values we often tend to neglect: Beethoven’s Sixth is by no means inferior to his Fifth or Ninth. However, when I compare it to such ‘small’ films as Kieslowski’s “A Short Story about Love”, it falls just a little short, feels just a little shallow. Then again, films like “A Short Story….” happens once in a blue moon; it is futile to expect such miracle every time. I am detecting these faults only because it comes from the hands of the man who made “Elephant”. For anyone else of lesser caliber, it would have been a resounding victory.
The music of the film is interesting, to say the least. Unlike the ascetic and minimalist score of his previous “Elephant”, here he throws the whole kitchen sink at us; he uses Beethoven symphonies, oldies, bluegrass, country, acid-rock, and an abundant amount of musical quotations from Fellini’s films (mainly from Nino Rota’s score for “Juliet of Spirits” and “Amarcord”). At first, I was shaking my head, “no, no, this is all wrong”. Yet, the music was simultaneously disturbing and arresting my attention. It took me a while to make sense of it: Van Sant is using it as a discordant note. He places a part from Beethoven’s Ninth right after playing a country song, and just about when you are on the verge of recognizing the symphony, he abruptly cuts it off. Watch that beautiful sequence where we see Jennifer (played by Taylor Momsen), Alex’s girlfriend, is being ditched by Alex; we see a close-up of Jennifer talking incessantly while the only thing we hear is a beautiful, French-like nocturne by Nino Rota. The satire is devastating; you have to see it to believe it. There are those quintessential Van Sant moments that are so profound yet completely inscrutable; watch Alex’s younger brother recount a part of a film verbatim to his brother. Watch the slow-motion shot where all the skater kids of the school stride down the hallway like a slightly unhinged, teen-age “Wild Bunch”. Watch the mesmerizing sequence shot with an 8mm handheld where the skaters skateboard at Paranoid Park. Watch the title scene: it has no direct link with the narrative, yet it is what the film is. If you can make sense of the first shot after watching the film, then, don’t worry, you have got the feel.

I will rate this 4 & 1/2 because it is a Gus Van Sant’s film. I am giving this a 4 & ½ because 5 is for “Elephant”.

2007 has been a great year for teen movies. With such commercial efforts like “Juno”, offbeat-s like “Tracy Fragments” (I’ll review this film next), and with such mature films like “Paranoid Park”, the teenagers are finally getting a depth they deserve in films. Who knows, may be we are watching the birth of a new genre here, the “Neo-Teen-Drama” genre. There is a possibility that the cosmopolitan hyperreality of our postmodern times is seeking its expression through these films. Films like “Paranoid Park” are ultimately significant due to this final reason, because there is no time more important than the present.
                                                                        BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Michael Clayton by Tony Gilroy (2007); Rating: 4 & 1/2 in 5

In recent decades, the film fraternity (forgive the word) has started to take the question of genre seriously. It signals good health: finally, we are out of the mist/mystery of the celluloid sheen. It means we are treating film-making as an exercise and not as a personal whimsy. Of course, our genre-awareness is a definitive product of our ever-increasing obsession with Hollywood, THE play-ground of genres and sub-genres. Very interestingly, genres came into existence almost always due to the financial “dark underbelly” of cinema as an art-form, but we will not get into that here; let us not digress. Within this area of genre, I often came across a nigglingly incommodious term: Neo-noir. Noir, as we all know, is an urban, American genre that used to rule the silver-screen during the 1940s and 50s. A perfect example of this genre would be Polanski’s “Chinatown”. Anyway. But what is “Neo-noir”? Is it a distinct genre? I never found any evidence to that. Is it a sub-genre? What exactly is “neo” about it? Deeply suspicious, I have always denied this term its existence; for me, it was always noir and that’s about it. Michael Clayton, the 2007 film made by debutant director Tony Gilroy, for the first time, has made me aware of the possibility of the existence of something called Neo-noir; -- that is my grateful indebtedness towards this film. However, I am still not flattered by the term; --- it does not signify a separate genre, or a sub-genre, it simply means that the essential requirements of the original genre, the Noir, is stripped down to the bare minimum. Out goes the detective, night chiaroscuros, femme fatales that always make the wrong choice; only the troubled masculinity, empowered (a very nasty word, but I am using it due to the lack of acceptable alternatives) women who always pay the price at the end. From that perspective, Michael Clayton is a perfectly executed Noir, and that’s no meager compliment: Noir is the mother of all “New Wave” cinema movements ever experienced by us.

Strictly speaking though, Michael Clayton is a legal/court-room thriller, a genre that has grown on John Grisham novels and Michael Douglass characters. At the centre of the narrative, there is this typical American pharmaceutical company named U-North that is facing a huge lawsuit filed by hundreds of small farmers who have been suffering from cancer due to the strongly carcinogenic content present in a certain U-North product. At the court, U-North is being represented by Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, one of the greatest law farms in the world. The case was being handled for six years by Arthur Eden (played by Tom Wilkinson), the senior-most and the most brilliant litigation lawyer and a partner of the farm. He is a manic-depressive and a close friend to Michael Clayton (played by George Clooney). Clayton is the “hidden ace” of the farm; he is the “miracle worker”. By definition, he is a janitor, but he is so great in his job, he can be compared to those too-famous-for-their-own-good heart surgeons: they all get cases with 5% survival probability! What exactly is Clayton’s job? Cleaning up the mess: a client hits a man on the road, he is there to clean it up with the police in ten minutes. He is a realist; he enjoys breaking the illusions of rich clients that they will be cooed and soothed for what they have done, they will be told they have “options”. He has ‘connections’ all over the country; he used to be an Assistant District Attorney during the eighties in Queens, New York. He has a big debt of 75,000 dollars he will have to pay within a week, and he is bust up to the wall, although he looks prosperous. Following a bad advice given by his alcoholic, druggy brother Timmy, he bought a restaurant that went up into smoke even before he could utter the word “restaurant”. He would not let it reflect on his brother though; he is determined to pay it back by himself. He has a dark side: he is a high-roller in poker played at a certain basement in Chinatown.

Arthur Eden is skipping his medication, and losing his grip on reality. During his six years of research on the case, he has gathered evidence of the tremendous crime U-North has been committing for years, the crime he is paid to protect from exposure. In his manic righteous zeal, he decides to go against U-North all by himself. While the testimony from a plaintiff was being taken, suddenly he starts to strip, offering his clothes to the plaintiff, whom he calls “perfect Anna”. U-North is horrified at this turn of event, and at the forefront of the reaction is Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton in her Oscar-winning role), the Chief Legal Advisor at U-North. In Arthur Eden’s briefcase, she finds something so incriminating that she realizes the future of the company, and with that, her own, is on the line. Thus starts the cat-&-mouse game; bodies pile up, cars get blown into pieces. Enough of the plot for now. You have to watch the film for that.

The first good news about this film: -- it is NOT a message film. I cannot describe my relief when I realized it is not so: there is absolutely nothing worse than a message movie. I would rather watch a B-movie than a message film. [Anyone with enough brains will be able to figure the reason of my repulsion out, but still, I will present a short explanation. The so-called ‘message’ is actually a ‘preferred reading’ films often force upon their viewers; it teaches us the ideology (most often and most obviously, it is “Love America”) of the ruling class, nation, or party. For example, Spielberg’s “The Terminal” ‘teaches’ us that, does not matter how much terrorism threatens and how barbaric the Americans really are, by mimicking the ‘eternal goodness’ of the Americans, everyone from the Third World can ingratiate themselves with the ‘civilization’ a.k.a America (hence, mirroring the politics of Frank Capra); his “Munich” clearly tries to revisit 9/11 (a signature American death drive/wish), while willfully obscuring the boundary between the Palestinians and the Israelis, a difference that enables him to keep his democratic position intact (and thus no becoming completely a Bush’s pet), while remaining American. Of course, all films carry, to different extents, the propagandas of the rulers; however, ‘message’ films do that without an iota of shame.] In fact, the corruption of U-North is openly shown from the very beginning; it is not a matter of revelation. The chief conflict in the film is between a powerful woman masquerading (have you seen anything more unabashedly masculine than Chanel suits?) as a masculine symbol succumbing to the dark sides of the power structure, and an equally powerful man, all too aware of the ruthless compromises, who is trying to go against the stream just this once. Femme fatale loses noir-man wins. However, as feminist critics have often pointed out, noir is a genre that exposes the weaknesses of masculinity more potently than almost any other genre. Should we read it as a film that ‘justly’ punishes the ‘wrong’ woman who tries to control masculine power; or should we read it as an exposure of the patriarchal corporate power-structure that forces a woman to ‘become’ a man and do its dirty business, and then ‘punishes’ her exactly for that? The film, clearly, can be read in both ways without using too much imagination. The responsibility of the reading will lie upon us, and not on the director; choice of the version is completely ours, and it will only expose our own hidden politics as a viewer. Those that will read it merely as a morality tale or as a thriller will do it at the peril of being exposed as a closet misogynist. The mise-en-scene is the true protagonist here: it is all about the inner ugliness of the patriarchal corporate structure.

Michael Clayton is the quintessential noir-man, sans low fedora and colts under armpits: his morality is not exactly top-notch (he does not show any qualms while covering up the road accident early in the film), he has troubled personal life, -- divorced, no girlfriend (apparently), trying hard to keep in touch with parenthood, loosing a lot of money because of a brother. He is not macho in any, even far-fetched, way; in fact, like a lots of corporate people, he is so cool that he looks and seems asexual. He is not in control of his life: his daily, expert dabbling with high-stake issues forces him to enjoy danger and risk in some small, albeit very harmful, way, by gambling away serious amounts of money. Like the noir-man, all he has is his job, the offices, leased Mercedes and Lear jets. There is one big, thwarted love in his life, a love that will finally become the crisis of his life: his friendship with the manic-depressive Arthur Eden (a hint at homosexuality? Clayton is closest and most personal with Arthur; in fact, one of his messages sound like the apology from a lover; also, eight years earlier, he had seen Arthur through his first attack of manic-depression). It is for Arthur Eden he puts everything on the line, although he does it still pretty reluctantly, only after his own life is threatened. Karen Crowder is the mirror-image here: what Clayton misses in life (being back in the litigation team), what he could have been, what he escapes from (being caught red-handed), what he truly does (play the ruthless game of percentages). As the name of the movie suggests, the film is also a character study, with no hero, or a villain.

The first big strength of the film comes from the script: it is trim, non-judgmental, terse, precise, without bravado dialogues while refusing to become drab; in short, effective. The script is written by the director himself, and he is a star scriptwriter; his scriptwriting credit includes all the three Bourne movies, Extreme Measures, Proof of Life, and Devil’s Advocate. As a director, however, it is hard to judge him by this debutante film. To his credit, he is economical, and prefers the classical slow tracking shots, understating the presence of the camera and thus heightening the tension between the characters. Working with the gifted cinematographer Robert Elswit (“Syriana”, “Magnolia”, “Good Night & Good Luck”; I specially enjoyed the last one), he managed to create brooding establishing shots (one memorable one would be where Karen Crowder is introduced. We see Tilda Swinton sitting on the commode of a claustrophobic cubicle while she discovers that her shirt is wet with sweat at the armpit), perfect ambiances, color palettes, and hues that works perfectly in this film. I found the background score pretty run-of-the-mill though; James Newton Howard provides a score that barely manages to work fine. However, these do not prove the mettle of this director; we see no sign of a style or idiosyncrasies. For now, he is a competent ‘director’ but not yet a film-maker for me. Let’s hope he will not become another Ron Howard (before going to bed, I pray to God every night, “do anything to me, I’ll not mind, but please, please, don’t make me watch another “Da Vinci Code” again. I’ll not survive the ordeal!”). It is always better to be optimistic.

The best thing about this film is its acting and casting. The quartet, around which this movie revolves, ---- George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson, and late Sydney Pollack---- gives brilliant performances. Switch these four, and the film will collapse. Tom Wilkinson, the veteran character-actor, portrays the manic-depressive Arthur with a tremendous gusto and unabashed, zany, manic incoherence; his performance is like the insane force we experience while listening to Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue. He has the difficult task of delivering long and precarious voice-overs, and he passes the exam in flying colors. Tilda Swinton, although unknown to Hollywood, has done enough work in British cinema to remain forever among the great British leading ladies (she was the fetish-star for late director Derek Jarman, one of major directors belonging to the queer cinema movement, and certainly a British great). However, Hollywood is famously incestuous; only after this film, let us hope, it will start noticing this brilliant actor. There is something unnerving in the way Swinton portrays Karen Crowder. She is a tremendous physical actress; her merest body movements will tell you the story, most of them will invariably give you a slight unease. Her low-key, sugary viper-voice is mesmerizing. She manages to make her character touchingly three-dimensional within very little screen-space: she manages to remain simultaneously steely, and twitchingly nervous within every single frame. She absolutely deserves her Oscar and many things more.

I am terribly late at reviewing this film; it has already become a thing of past. However, one of my intentions behind writing this review was to pay my tribute to the great actor, director, and producer Sydney Pollack, who has just died from cancer. In this film, Pollack plays Marty Bach, the head of the law farm, under whose direct orders, Michael Clayton operates. In this character, Pollack gives a strong, assured performance that will look authentic from miles away. Pollack as a director has never been an auteur in the true sense, but he has been an excellent middle-brow director who believed in that ancient Hollywood tradition of no-frills story-telling. He showed that honest middle-brow films like his “Out of Africa” and “Tootsie” can be quite as effective as Indies. Hollywood will sorely miss him; his dedication and involvement was complete, he never preached banalities, never left ‘messages’ through his films. With this Spielberg-Lucas-influenced Ron Howard generation, the ancient Hollywood tradition ------ starting from King Vidor to the Sydney Pollack-s of our days ------- of honest middle-brow story-telling is facing extinction. We would prefer a Sydney Pollack thousand times over a Spielberg or a Howard. Directors like Alexander Payne will, let’s hope, keep this tradition alive.

And, here at last, we come to George Clooney. Clooney is one of those tragic actors: horribly typecast by the industry, and having too big a persona to be not typecast by the studios, he is still desperately struggling to find original and challenging roles. After a few initial debacles, he has resolutely avoided typecast roles with one notable exception (the Oceans franchisee), acting in films like “Solaris”, “The Good German”, “O Brother, Where are Thou?”, “Syriana” etc. As a director, he has impressed me; although “Crash” took the Oscar home, “Good Night, & Good Luck” was, by far, the second best film of that milieu, coming second only to “Brokeback Mountain”, which is undeniably a great film and an exceptionally brave love story. Unlike other male heart-throbs, George is a thorough actor: he knows how to remain within the role and not become bigger than the character. There is a scene in the movie, where Clayton, at the crack of dawn, stops the car by a hill and sees three horses standing at the top of it. He comes out of the car, and slowly makes his way towards the horses. The scenario is precarious: it runs the risk of becoming horribly mystic (which would have ruined the noir suspense), or a mere vehicle that showcases the charm and charisma of the ‘big star’. While watching the scene, I was thinking what other big, Hollywood heartthrobs would have done with this scene. Brad Pitt, he would have invariably tried to show existential angst, looking broodingly eccentric and orgasm-generating-ly dangerous, chewing his nails, and then, suddenly, flashing his million-watt smile that comes right out of “Legend of the Fall” (Brad Pitt is a good actor, but he has become ensnared by his public image). Tom Cruise would have lit up the screen with his over-enthusiastic histrionics and dental brilliance (those teeth! My god, there are the worst thing that has happened to Hollywood since Stallone’s mumbling speech and Arnie’s Biceps!); Johnny Depp, although always unpredictable, is fundamentally too mannered to be a good noir-man. In George, we have a method actor good enough to to carry out such precarious scenes; if you are a student of acting, watch the dour face of Clooney during this scene, and learn what cinematic acting is all about: under-acting (you can also watch Gabriel Byrne in Coen Brother’s “Miller’s Crossing”, another tremendous example of the noir genre). If he had done one notch more, it would have become the worst scene of movie and marred the complete effect. I sincerely hope that the teenagers and tabloids will forget him quickly and, finally, he will be able to enjoy the status of a genuinely good actor.

Now, I must rate the film. Before I rate it, I must speak a word of caution here. In this page, if a film gets a 5 and another gets a 4 & ½, it does not necessarily mean that the first one is better than the second. I judge the film within its premises, its set expectations, its details, its genre, and its predecessors. When Todd Haynes is making “I’m Not There”, he is following the monumental examples of Frederico Fellini and others; I gave him 4 & ½ while comparing the film with those unforgettable ‘prefect 5’ films such as 8 &1/2.

I will give this film a 4 & ½. It is not exactly a great film, but it works very well within its limitations.

I started this article with Neo-noir; I will end at that note too. I am still flummoxed: what is Neo-noir? It seems to me to be a supra-disciplinary exercise. For example, this film is the exercise of the barest minimum specifications of the noir genre within the broad structure of the legal/courtroom thrillers. Similarly, Coen Bother’s brilliant film “Miller’s Crossing” (1991) is the exploration of the noir principles within the broad framework of the gangster genre. But is that it? That’s all? What gives this term the legitimacy to stand alone and distinct? What is so “neo” about it? I am still deeply suspicious of the term. If any of you have any input that can help me get the idea, please send it to me. That will be really helpful.
                                                                                             BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI