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Dir. Gus van Sant
Rating: 6.3 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
Gus van Sant and Larry Clark remain in competition to claim the doomed, beautiful youth market as their own. Though, while Clark goes in for the more aggressive and sexual tableau -- witness his striking Ken Park -- Van Sant has a softer, more elusive thing in mind. In this, his latest low-budget affair, he has composed an elegiac portrait of one skater kid, Alex Tremaine (Gabe Nevins), who gets involved in a highly regrettable night at the train yard, where he may or may not be responsible for a murder of a security guard. The story is told in fragments, from sweeping, slow pans of the characters, to sketchy video footage of Alex and his comrades skating in and through Portland. We hear Alex's VO over the footage, spoken in a halting, unprofessional streaks, as if he were unsuccessfully reading a term-paper in front of his class. True to his indie nature, Van Sant is never content to just let his camera do the talking: As ever, he takes chances, scrapping together disjointed elements as if patching together a thread-bare quilt. By focusing almost exclusively on Alex and his jumbled perspective, he does achieve a certain Raskolnikov-like effect. We watch him hang with his friends, spend time with his girl friend, Jennifer (Taylor Momsen), almost confess to his confidant, Macy (Lauren McKinney), but at no time is he ever able to unburden himself -- except, as it happens, to those of us in the film's audience. Meanwhile, even though parents and teachers are often filmed as blurry and inconsequential, the film comes across less a searing screed about youthful indifference, and more a (quite possibly over-) artful examination of just how badly we all want things to go back to normal.
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