I do not blame the viewer who would stop Paranoid Park within or around the 20 minute mark. Those first 20 minutes are exasperating. ‘What is he doing?’ you might be wondering about Van Sant (most of those who’ll seek this film out will be Van Sant fans and thus willing to humor his indulgences) as he insists on following around newcomer and acting novice Gabe Nevins (born in 1991), a kid who has the expressiveness of a blank wall.
His friends are a paltry bunch, and the bankruptcy of their character is only compounded by their insolence and discourtesy. Then it dawned on me: Alex (Nevins) is the only one who is not insolent or discourteous – he remains silent much of the time amidst the rudimentary discourse of his peers and fellow skate park delinquents. 
The introduction of his girlfriend, Jennifer, is a stab to the nerves, as the girl playing her (Taylor Momsen, 15, who the DVD box informs is an actress from “Gossip Girl”) can be best summed up with one word: Ugh. Her acting was so foully amateurish I concluded that the sometimes straying good judgment of Van Sant had now wandered out of sight completely. But, being an open-minded chap and in the habit of humoring the most discouraging artistic deviations, I stuck with it. As the film progresses, Nevins’ perpetually blank demeanor, when juxtaposed with the simultaneously jaded and callow (the most odious youths of them all) personalities and attitudes of his schoolmates and boarding buddies, becomes a small oasis of reticence. When an abiding police detective (Daniel Liu) asks to speak with all of the boys at the school about the freakish death of a night security guard down at the Portland railway, the boys exhibit the behavior manifested by a complete and utter absence of breeding. Many of these boys, including Alex, are the products of broken homes, and though it seems to be a very minor element of the story, divorce is a crucial theme of this film.
I believe Gus Van Sant and the film is fascinated by Alex for these reasons: compared to the other kids in this movie, he is a paragon of courtesy and introspection. We see his father, clearly once an unsavory individual (both arms have tattoo sleeves); now just a distracted dad, and he inquires about Alex’s life in a perfunctory manner, “You still boarding?” - Alex: “Yeah.” - “Right on.” The film is not condemning parents who divorce, just displaying from a dispassionate perspective the way that divorce is often the result of selfish adults. Divorce can sometimes lead to a vague state of anomie, producing base children and base teenagers. And why shouldn’t they be? Without a reliable positive adult influence, how are they to learn tact? So it is unusual for someone like Alex to surface, who is good and decent and courteous from instinct. He’s a good kid, and Van Sant provided me with one of the most moving and joyous scenes in recent memory: Alex’s little brother, Henry (Dillon Hines), with an uncanny lack of self-consciousness, jubilantly recounts scenes from Napoleon Dynamite in front of his big brother, who listens with tact and abidance. It is a wonderful, wonderful scene.
The film contains Van Sant’s usual brilliant Impressionist renderings of spiritually barren domestic interiors. It also continues his fascination with youth, especially youth on the margins. Anyone who tries to tell you that Van Sant has a prurient ulterior motive when choosing these stories is being obtuse, glib, and mean-spirited. These are generally the same people who, upon superficial inspection, conclude that the sexuality on display in KIDS (1995) is intended to be titillating. I once heard an unsubstantiated item of gossip that Van Sant was sleeping with Elias McConnell, the young man who plays the photographer Eli in Van Sant’s Elephant. Even if that is true, the motivation for making the film was thematic and aesthetic, as was the motivation for making My Own Private Idaho and Last Days, all of which incorporate homosexual youths into the fabric of the story. Van Sant’s last three films, Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days are all morbid minimalist works; together they constitute Van Sant’s informal “Death Trilogy.” This collection of three, is, in my estimation, among Van Sant’s best work (along with Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho), an avant-garde magnum opus that, by the rigors of its concept, sifts Van Sant’s good directorial propensities and his rotten inclinations, filtering out the crap, and leaving pure, spare lyricism. The films grew increasingly more fatalistic on the journey towards the gloomy end, showing microcosms that took order for granted, finding hidden reserves of lawlessness and despair inside ostensibly functioning systems. So it is a relief to discover that Van Sant has now provided us with a film which quietly observes hidden reserves of thoughtfulness and decency inside derelict communities ostensibly forsaken to philistines.
Grade: A-
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