Teen titan

Alex (Gabe Nevins) tries to find happiness and connection with the other skateboarders in Paranoid Park. (Scott Green/Maximum Film Distribution)

Teens in teen movies have certain traits that distinguish them from teens not in teen movies. Movie teens tend to have brand-name clothes, perfectly tousled hair and bright, straight teeth. They like making bets that compel the best-looking guys to go out with the gawkiest girls — and vice versa — and when the boys and girls fall in love, they don’t have sex. If they drink or do drugs, they suffer grave consequences. Sometimes, they break out in spontaneous song-and-dance routines, though that usually only happens in movies with the word “musical” in the title.

None of these descriptions apply to the teens in Gus Van Sant’s films. They get tongue-tied and unsure of themselves. They feel hurt or scared, though their expressionless faces don’t give anything away. They might know about sex and drugs, but they don’t expect either to be a solution to anything. More often than not, they get caught up in violent events that test their abilities to cope. These teens are real, vulnerable and usually in over their heads.

Such is the case for the adolescent at the centre of Van Sant’s latest movie, Paranoid Park. In this adaptation of a young-adult novel by Blake Nelson, a teen skateboarder named Alex (Gabe Nevins) is involved in an accidental death near the Portland skate park for which the film is named. Told in the same non-linear fashion and long-take style Van Sant has used since switching from big-budget Hollywood projects to more idiosyncratic independent productions, Paranoid Park is one of the American director’s most compelling movies to date.

The world of teenagers is a perennial interest of Van Sant’s, and provides one of the few throughlines in a body of work that has included a sympathetic portrait of drug addicts (1989’s Drugstore Cowboy), the hit that launched the careers of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (1997’s Good Will Hunting), a disconcertingly faithful remake of a Hitchcock classic (1998’s Psycho) and a moving tribute to Kurt Cobain (2005’s Last Days).

In the 23 years since his 1985 debut feature, Mala Noche — long out of circulation but recently released on DVD — Van Sant has repeatedly returned to young characters. Moreover, he has rarely presented them in a manner to which viewers are accustomed. These are not the slick, savvy kids of She’s All That, Bring It On or any other recent Hollywood production that uses the formula set down by John Hughes in ’80s hits like Pretty in Pink. Van Sant’s teens also bear little resemblance to the sex-mad horndogs in Superbad or American Pie, nor are they the amoral bad seeds who populate indie youthsploitation flicks like Thirteen or Kids. Just as Van Sant has expressed little interest in glossing over the complexities of teen life, he’s been equally disinclined to portray its unsavoury aspects for salacious effect.

Instead, Van Sant’s portrayals of young people are honest and unvarnished. That’s partially the result of the audacity of many of his films. Though best remembered for the performances of River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves as male hustlers, My Own Private Idaho (1991) also features haunting appearances by several non-actors who share the same background as their characters. Presented in pseudo-documentary fashion, they recount to the camera their horrific experiences with very bad johns. Though their faces are young, they already have the eyes of much older people. They tell their stories with an air of detachment, as if these horrors happened to someone else; they’ve learned to keep their emotions somewhere far from the surface. Their presence helps give a tough edge to a movie that may have grown unduly precious thanks to its surreal imagery and fanciful borrowings from Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

Alicia Miles (left) and John Robinson (right) play two of the teens in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. (Fine Line Features)

Teens in rough circumstances are also prominent in one of Van Sant’s biggest hits, To Die For (1995). Nicole Kidman plays Suzanne Stone, an air-headed, small-town TV personality who will do anything to earn the fame she craves. While making a documentary video called Teens Speak Out, she cultivates a friendship with three denim-wearing, long-haired youths. (In case you couldn’t tell they were headbangers, their early scenes are accompanied by the sound of heavy metal.) Suzanne soon involves them in a plot to kill her husband, believing that her declaration of innocence will take precedence over the words of, as she puts it, “a bunch of 16-year-old losers who grew up in trailers and whose parents sit around drinking and screwing their cousins.”

Suzanne’s contempt is not shared by Van Sant. Though dim-witted, the boy who performs the killing (played by River’s younger brother, Joaquin) is portrayed as lovestruck and naive rather than deadly and amoral. Lydia (Alison Folland), the lonely, overweight teenage girl whom Suzanne befriends, may be the only truly sympathetic figure in To Die For’s gallery of rogues, liars and fools.

In 2003, Van Sant won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival for Elephant. The film conveyed the horror of a high-school shooting rampage in a manner that was unconventional yet unusually powerful. It’s interesting to note that Van Sant devotes the majority of Elephant’s running time not to the killers (modelled after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine massacre) but to the other students, each of whom experiences an unrelated crisis or fleeting epiphany without knowing this day could be their last.

The film’s characters are played by genuine Portland-area teens, most with no acting experience. Though a few come off as stereotypical (notably a trio of Heathers who purge together in the girls’ bathroom), the characters seem as idiosyncratic as any real collection of teenagers. The fact that Van Sant’s ever-roving camera pays such close attention to the eventual victims — like aspiring photographer Elias (Elias McConnell) and awkward wallflower Michelle (Kristen Hicks) — is the main reason Elephant has such a profound impact.

Like Elephant, Paranoid Park closely adheres to the point of view of its teen characters — in this case, it’s Alex, the young skateboarder who decides to conceal his involvement in the death of a security guard. Already troubled by the breakup of his parents, he becomes increasingly alienated from those around him. Grappling with his secret, Alex longs for the sense of belonging and family he sees among the street kids and skaters at Paranoid Park. (Again, the teens often play characters based on themselves. Van Sant largely cast the movie with the help of MySpace.)

In many ways, Alex is a quintessential Van Sant teenager: his placid, somewhat evasive demeanour can’t entirely disguise his pain and confusion. Paranoid Park proves that growing up is often very hard to do — but it’s also a potent reminder that these teens deserve our respect and sympathy for their often imperfect efforts to do just that.

Paranoid Park opens in Toronto on March 20.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto-based writer.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.