BlackBook Magazine

Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s meditation on murder and its after-shocks, proves his best work yet, while Asia Argento takes flight in Olivier Assayas's new thriller.

Michael Madsen and Asia Argento in Boarding Gate.

Paranoid Park is strange fruit, a blend of thriller and coming-of-age story where, of all things, a homicide proves the unusual rite of passage between adolescence and adulthood. It’s also director Gus Van Sant’s masterpiece.

Teenage Alex (Gabe Nevins) does not plan on committing a crime; he’s a feckless suburban cipher faithful to the usual diversions of music, girls, and skateboarding. But one night a train-hopping stunt turns tragic when he accidentally knocks a security guard in front of an oncoming locomotive. Panicked, but not especially guilt-ridden, Alex decides to keep it to himself.

Outwardly, this is a stock thriller set-up. The requisite detective comes snooping around, and there is something of a cat-and-mouse narrative that unfolds. But Van Sant treats this as an almost trifling consequence of the murder. Alex might be upset, but he’s pure sangfroid when dealing with the detective, disposing of evidence, and establishing his alibi. Like Robert Bresson’s stony protagonists, he rarely betrays emotion, and appears little worried about capture.

What he is worried about is his spiritual solvency. The killing awakens Alex intellectually, prompting the crude but significant realization that “there’s something outside of normal life: different levels of stuff.” He dumps his preening and shallow girlfriend. He starts keeping a journal of his thoughts. And he begins to identify with adults he previously found as inscrutable and dull as the ones in Peanuts cartoons.

For Van Sant, this initiation is the more relevant outcome of the accident, and he underscores the idea deftly within the film’s texture. A schizophrenic score mirrors Alex’s transition by shifting abruptly from orchestral flourishes—courtesy of several Fellini pictures—to ominous piano tinklings. Poetic longueurs of skateboarding teens add a wistful, elegiac note to the closed chapter of his adolescence. And long, slow-motion sequences reveal Alex nearly paralyzed by burgeoning self-awareness.

Neither the murder, nor the cover-up are very exceptional in Van Sant’s universe. They might be terrifying and repugnant, but they aren’t surprising. The real shock is the idea that the experiences might somehow be affirmative for Alex. Paranoid Park amazes by striving to be the most thoughtful, positive movie about a murderer ever made.

Another picture that goes easy on its murderous subject is Olivier Assayas’s Boarding Gate. Asia Argento plays Sandra, an ex-prostitute who kills her former pimp (Michael Madsen) and flees to Hong Kong to reinvent herself. Her dream is to open a nightclub, but her business partners have other ideas, and Sandra soon finds herself running for her life.

Like Clean before it, Boarding Gate focuses on a deracinated heroine struggling to find redemption from a rudderless existence. But escaping a criminal past isn’t easy, and Sandra might have too much dirt on her to wash off. She is not a good person—in another movie, she’d likely be the villain—but Assayas invites us to sympathize with her regardless. His cynical (but not untimely) argument is that in a world of reduced moral expectations, it doesn’t actually matter if Sandra successfully goes straight; it’s enough that she even wants to.

Argento is terrific as the desperate anti-hero. Outside her native Italy she has worked mostly in supporting roles, but Boarding Gate proves she can carry a picture solo. Her once pert, overweening presence has tempered with age, and there is a bruised and vulnerable quality to her performance that subtly elevates what might otherwise have been a mediocre B-picture into something at times verging on the sublime.

Also struggling to overcome B-material is Sam Rockwell, whose performance in David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels is pure flailing intensity amidst a grim parade of bad scripting and misdirection. Rockwell plays Glenn, a white-trash alcoholic desperate to reconnect with his estranged wife Annie (Kate Beckinsale). Annie, however, has new men in her life—a sleazoid lover (Nicky Katt) and a teenage co-worker (Michael Angarano)—and her disinterest effectively drives Glenn bonkers.

As a chronicler of the American South, director Green made a powerful first impression with George Washington and All the Real Girls, but here he abandons his usual geographic milieu with disastrous results. The plot is rip-cord jerky and the casting flawed. No one will buy Kate Beckinsale as a gritty trailer-home type. If not for Rockwell’s so-good-it-seems-incongruous turn, Snow Angels would be all slush.