NYLON - March 2008 - (Page 158) WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR In his superlative new film Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant continues his tradition of quietly pioneering cinema. By Dennis Lim. Photographed by Aliya Naumoff Most indie filmmakers imagine themselves to be outsiders, and this romantic notion is especially true in the case of Gus Van Sant. Almost all his protagonists—from the junkies and hustlers of his early movies (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho) to the high-school outcasts who populate Elephant and the new Paranoid Park—exist on the fringes of mainstream society. And Van Sant himself, who remains based in Portland, Oregon, has never been completely at home in Hollywood (despite the occasional flirtation with famous stars and large budgets) or in the indie sphere (Sundance, then known as the U.S. Film Festival, rejected his first feature, Mala Noche, in 1986). His films have been notably candid about gay desire—beautiful young men are invariably photographed with tender eroticism—but he emerged too early to be lumped in with the New Queer Cinema of the ’90s and he has never shown much interest in polemics or identity politics. (His next film, however, will star Sean Penn as the San Francisco activist and gay-rights martyr Harvey Milk.) One reason he doesn’t fit in is that he always seems to be moving on. His is a career full of detours—not all of them, as he himself will admit, successful. But Van Sant, who turns 56 this year, is the rare artist whose appetite for risk and innovation has increased with age. On paper, Paranoid Park, his 12th film (in limited release and on pay-per-view through IFC First Take) is a familiar coming-of-age story about a teenage skate kid. In practice, it’s as precisely tuned in to the wavelength of its central character as any film has ever been. With its fragmented chronology, layered sound design, and dreamy sense of time suspended or folding in on itself, it also comes close to reinventing the language of movies, the means by which moods are set and stories are told. “What I try to acknowledge when we start working on a film is that taylor momsen, who stars with gabe nevins (opposite), in paranoid park. there are so many forms and idioms to choose from,” says Van Sant, speaking by phone from his home in Portland. From the beginning, even before he was consciously picking apart narrative conventions, Van Sant cultivated a poetic style characterized by lush images and intuitive edits. His DIY debut, Mala Noche, is an improbably romantic portrait of a Portland liquor-store clerk with a thing for teenage Mexican boys (Van Sant described the book it was based on as “Death in Venice on Skid Row”). Conflicted male relationships, sexual and otherwise, dominate most of Van Sant’s films. His archetypal heroes are alienated, painfully sensitive sorts. These themes are evident even in his biggest commercial success, Good Will Hunting (1997), which won newly minted golden boys Ben Affleck and Matt Damon an Oscar for best screenplay and earned singer-songwriter Elliott Smith a nomination for best song (he lost to Céline Dion’s Titanic theme). But Van Sant didn’t cash in on his Hollywood success—instead he seemed to freeze. His next couple of films were self-consciously repetitive. His shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, a Warholian exercise in A FEW OF GUS VAN SANT’S MOST MEMORABLE MOMENTS Drugstore Cowboy (1989) My Own Private Idaho (1991)
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