Director(s): David Gordon Green.
Screenplay: David Gordon Green.
Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Michael Angarano, Jeannetta Arnette, Griffin Dunne, Nicky Katt, Tom Noonan, Connor Paolo, Amy Sedaris and Olivia Thirlby.
Distributor: Warner Independent Pictures.
Runtime: 106 min.
Rating: R.
Year: 2007
"Realism and poetry were sustained in exquisite balance." That is how Armond White, deploring the slavishness of Undertow, accurately encapsulated the genius of David Gordon Green's George Washington. Like Undertow and All the Real Girls before it, Snow Angels is an obnoxious pageant of effusive style, the cinematic equivalent of a Precious Moments catalog. This one is a twee Nashville panorama, set—according to the film's press notes—in a small town north of the Mason Dixon line, though it may as well be squeezing us into the snow globe Orson Welles drops in the opening of Citizen Kane.
Before the story returns to the past, weeks before double shotgun blasts interrupt a school's band practice, coach has a mean hissy fit. "We are all part of a formation," he wails, his spastic unease never justified like the cultural panic that grips Henry Gibson at the end of Nashville, foisting shallow theme on audiences as compulsorily as Green pushes his fulsome artistry. After school, Arthur (Michael Angarano) works at a Chinese restaurant, with Annie (Kate Beckinsale), the young woman who used to baby-sit him when he was a boy, and Barb (Amy Sedaris), a hot wire whose husband Annie is sleeping with. Green choreographs more than he directs, revealing the links in the story's formation of characters as if he were drawing a snowflake, or connecting dots, la-la-la-la-la. They say no two are exactly alike, but Green's are all the same: meticulous and inert, unlike Altman's more delicate and spontaneously combustible tapestries of human feeling.
Green's style is as arbitrary as the Cloverfield monster: Death, accidental and otherwise, is preciously photographed, set to diddering music from the same gene pool as Sigur Rós, the camera coyly pushing into scenes, then out, at times drifting away like a gust of wind from characters in mid-conversation to linger on the corner of a room. It's oh so quiet and still and peaceful, but even when characters blow fuses, there's never a zing-boom, just more hushed aesthetic din. "No one cares about choices," someone says, ostensibly about life, though this nugget of wisdom is a concise summation of Green's poetic effects, which never feel keyed to the reality of his characters, who speak in ways more curious than the ear-chomping solipsists from Juno. Green doesn't seem to be charting a recognizable world, only the contours of his own mind.
Why does every television in this town play such intolerably fetch television programming? "Tomorrow is going to be hard," says Arthur's mother (Jeannetta Arnette), which means crafting a wobbly house on the living room table out of photographs, Sabado Gigante playing in the background. "Oy, gevalt," says the dude Annie is fucking, but is he even Jewish? Then there's the nerdy Lila (Olivia Thirlby), who is, like, oh my god, so cute, running down derivations of "fellatio" in the school library with Arthur, later writing "Hey you!" in purple marker on the back of his hand. Poor Sam Rockwell, who clearly caught something from Vera Farmiga on the set of Joshua, bears the brunt of Green's preciousness: As Glenn, the ticky, bibbity-bobbity, doggy-dooing Jesus freak, who ludicrously does a drunken slow dance with Morgan Freeman and Freddy Kruger look-alikes at one point, the actor plops licentiously down on Green's seesaw of reality and poetry, tilting the scales in favor of the latter and sending the former into the stratosphere.
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Paranoid Park
Director: Gus Van Sant.
Screenplay: Gus Van Sant.
Cast: Gabe Nevins, Dan Liu, Jake Miller, Taylor Momsen, Lauren McKinney and Olivier Garnier.
Distributor: IFC First Take.
Runtime: 84 min.
Rating: NR.
Year: 2007
Normally, you wouldn't want to pay attention to a story told by a guy who admits, right off the bat, that he's "not that good at creative writing." But Gus Van Sant's haunting and immediate Paranoid Park understands adolescence as a kind of first draft, a series of raw experiences unmediated by wisdom, and as a result it allows its verbally-challenged protagonist to narrate in his own imperfect voice, rather than imposing a Wonder Years-style voice-over conscience. The films in Van Sant's recent long-take trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days) took sensationalistic news stories from real life and then stripped them of all causality, as a way of portraying human activity as essentially random and undetermined. But Paranoid Park is a deeper and even more bracing step into the unknown for the veteran filmmaker, a fully subjective probe into the consciousness of a young man and a generous display of artistic empathy.
Based on a young adult novel by Blake Nelson, Paranoid Park follows a shy high-school-aged Portland skateboarder named Alex (Gabe Nevins) after an impulsive decision leads to the accidental murder of a security guard on a train track not far from the titular skate-punk mecca. Alex is not suspected in the crime, so he keeps his involvement a secret. Consequently, his world begins to revolve in terrifying slow orbit: His cheerleader girlfriend (Taylor Momsen) openly displays her previously unapparent vapidity, his parents' impending divorce rapidly materializes, and Alex quietly reconsiders his emotional priorities. "I think…there's different levels of stuff," he tentatively concludes, and it seems impossible not to intuit exactly what he means.
Van Sant cast the film using MySpace in order to foster a sense of realism, but Paranoid Park is just as stylized as Elephant. Only the ends are different. Instead of depending on his long-take standby Harris Savides, Van Sant turned to Christopher Doyle, the other Greatest Cinematographer in the World, to capture the Super-8 swirl of skate-kid hero worship and the haze of adolescent panic. (Leslie Shatz's sound design sporadically offers musique concréte as a way of conveying Alex's fractured mental state.) Where Elephant's camera treated its beautifully doomed youths like lab rats, the style of Paranoid Park is perfectly in sync with its lead character; it reflects Alex's internal coping mechanisms. When Alex's girlfriend responds to his fumbling we-need-to-break-up plea, we see her vitriol, but we hear Nino Rota's theme from Juliet of the Spirits as a way of rendering the moment intriguingly grotesque instead of just painful. Where Elliott Smith's acoustic dirges served as pretty window dressing in Good Will Hunting, here the troubadour's mope music soothes like a necessary balm for wounds accumulated in high school hallways.
The Iraq war comes up in conversation more than once in Paranoid Park, as an abstract illustration of the type of pain and guilt disconnected masses should be feeling. Obviously, it's a difficult emotional jump from a Portland coffee shop to a battle-scarred Baghdad, and the world is indeed too big a place for an ignorant kid to have to incorporate that kind of horror. Being a kid is about keeping responsibility at bay and dismissing causality. (In its amoral disengagement, Elephant seemed childlike to a fault.) Van Sant's film microscopically reduces the scale of its moral universe to that of a single person—and the one stupid decision that will haunt his entire life—and by engaging fully in the experiment Paranoid Park earns its humanist stripes. By illuminating a little world where we can empathize with an "unrepentant murderer," Van Sant momentarily awakens our potential to spread our understanding across the street, across the park, across the globe. You start small, because, well…there's different levels of stuff.
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