Alex in Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park”

Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” is a movie on the edge of experimental, just narrative enough to be engaging, but artistic enough that it might make you scratch your head a bit. As with Gus Van Sant’s other movies, like “Elefant,” it’s about tortured youth and disillusionment. As a cinema experience, as much as it seems obtuse and existential, it probably has something really worthwhile to say to us about the way we’re experiencing the world.

It’s hard to pin the central theme down to anything in particular, because the story revolves around the life of the main character and portrays it in a number of ways: mundane, terrifying, and romanticized. At times, Alex is a detached, understimulated teenager; at times, he is a pragmatic actor with opinions and agency; at times, he is a dreamer adrift in his own head. At the turning point of the story, he is a frightened, paralyzed victim of circumstance, and a fallible human who has to deal with a range of unintended consequences.

A good deal of the film focuses on the filler between the important moments in Alex’s life. We often accompany him on his walks to and from class, and we often gaze for extended scenes into his eyes as he looks at somebody sitting next to him. The attention given to these minutiae makes it seem, at times, like the whole movie is an account of Alex’s denial and avoidance of the tragedy he witnessed. This aspect is what makes Ken Fox of TVGuide.com call the film “Dostoyevskian.” Read in a certain way, it’s a study of guilt seeping into everyday life in subtle ways, like “Crime and Punishment” so long before.

This definitely doesn’t adequately describe the movie, though. At certain times, Alex seems to have a real, believable teenagehood and agency, even apart from the psychological burden he’s bearing. For much of the film, his words are credible: he gives a good reason for being at Paranoid Park, and a believable reason for breaking up with his girlfriend, and he seems to care about his friends. We’re also introduced to his dream world, fantasies of skateboarding shown in grainy slow-motion shots, and this doesn’t seem to be a shallow facade created simply to cover up his guilt and fear. If his life is already empty and detached, is there even anything for a tragedy to suddenly “upset”?

Ultimately, the film becomes an exercise in misdirection: the dramatic moments are offset by the long, slow lingering shots, and the core emotional crisis is wrapped by a sort of existential crisis of teenagehood, equally poignant, but much more common.

Van Sant’s strength, as a filmmaker, is to allow the viewer to decide where the emphasis must lie. Is Alex’s detachment a symptom of his guilt? Is he distracted by tragedy, or by his dreams of skateboarding, so rudely interrupted by violence and death? Is the accident the defining moment for Alex’s personality, or is it merely a strange tangent, a litmus test for his level of distraction and alienation from the world?

This confusion — the loss of any reliable yardstick for judging what?s important and what’s just filler — is the problem for both Alex and for the audience, and on a day-to-day basis, it’s also the problem for all of us. Between mass media sensationalism, partisan politics, and the difficult daily tasks of managing households and working in a busted economy, we’re all dealing with misdirection, and we all face the possibility of detachment and alienation. You can’t deal with all the variables, all the time, and we have to figure out what defines us, whether it’s the big disasters or the daydreams and walks down the hallway.

Creating a suspenseful narrative is a challenge. Creating a suspenseful narrative that still refuses to give the audience definitive closure or an easy access point … that’s the accomplishment that makes “Paranoid Park” a unique experience.