As any number of reviews reveals, both the novel and the film aspire to retell Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for a young audience, a point that’s more confounding than it is interesting because such artificial inflatedness is wholly unnecessary: this story about a skater whose desire to fit in places him at the scene of a grisly accident (to woefully oversimplify things) is psychologically rich enough and intellectually stimulating enough in its own right that it does not need a 19th century Russian antecedent. The comparison with The Outsiders is apt, as the film version of Paranoid Park is also an adaptation of a young-adult novel, this one by Blake Nelson. To be sure, Van Sant’s world is more oneiric than the one that Francis Ford Coppola creates in his underappreciated version of Hinton’s The Outsiders, but when Van Sant begins his movie with a scene of the protagonist frolicking with a dog in the tall grass on the beach, I can’t help but think, “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home”. Not that Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park has many flaws to forgive, but let’s just say that he had me right from the S.E. Give me a quasi-poetic narration over what passes as a legitimately poetic image and I’ll forgive a film any number of flaws. It’s how I knew I loved Bergman’s Wild Strawberries not a minute in it’s why David Gordon Green’s George Washington is still my favorite movie that I’ve only seen one time it’s why I’m excited about the recently released director’s cut of Terrence Malick’s already overly long The New World.
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