Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” has received mostly respectful reviews (see Rotten Tomatoes for a rundown of major reviewing activity on the film) from the nation’s movie critics, though not “glowing” or “excited” reviews. Most of them seem to get what Van Sant is up to — which is to give an atmospheric account of a horrific moment and its reverberations in an alienated teenager’s life. (The Oregonian’s Shawn Levy was among the most positive.) It’s a little too “arty” for some of them, with its fractured narrative line, scene repetitions and slow-motion, soft-focus sequences. But really, that’s what the film is about — to create an artistic affect, simple on the face of it but maybe profound and complex upon reflection. We’ll see.

“Paranoid Park,” which closely tracks the plot of Portland native Blake Nelson’s Young Adult novel (which I haven’t read), is a portrait of Alex (Gabe Nevins), a 16 or maybe 17-year-old kid in a small family that is breaking up. Van Sant doesn’t give us much background on Alex — he doesn’t have a psychological theory to explain him, no “causes” for his behavior, he doesn’t supply a case history. That’s OK, from a “coherence” point of view: Alex doesn’t have the equipment to analyze himself very thoroughly; and no one around him is interested enough to hazard a guess about what’s going on behind that placid (maybe slightly worried-looking) exterior. Except maybe for Macy (Lauren McKinney), his younger friend from down the street. More about her in a moment.

So, we don’t know exactly why Alex has started to get into skateboarding, what he was into before, what his status at school might be. We have to accept that he simply is into skateboarding, even though he’s not good at it yet. His friend Jared skateboards, too, and persuades him to visit Paranoid Park (the skater-constructed skate park under the Burnside Bridge, in actuality), where the best and scruffiest skaters hang out. Alex protests that he’s not ready for Paranoid Park, and Jared, in his one good line of the movie, replies: “No one’s ever ready for Paranoid Park.”
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