I can’t think of a director ‘doing youth’ better than Gus Van Sant. He may have invented his own sub genre (the equivalent of music’s ‘Sad Core’ – Elliott Smith who happens to be on the movie’s sound track is a typical specimen). In ‘Elephant’, his movie about a massacre perpetrated by two teenagers, brought us ever so close to his subjects, allowing us to know better, if not empathize, with their motives (knowing nothing about the movie before watching it, it was exceptionally powerful for this reason as well).
(Spoiler alert!)
This time around he chooses to train Christopher Doyle’s excellent cinematography (his slow motion, undulating, and dreamy sequences in a skateboarding park are masterly) on Alex (Gabe Navins) and the ordinary life of this skateboarding, mostly awkward, always wide eyed teenager. Ordinary except for a killing that provides the film with its centre of gravity.
Van Sant’s protagonist is constantly moving (lumbering is more like it) through his life’s scenes. Quiet restlessness permeates the movie. It is a measured and bewildered all at once, fitting with Alex’s personality and his horror and torment over the killing of the train station attendant. In re-telling Blake Nelson’s story, Van Sant hides as much as he shows. What he chooses to keep outside of a frame, has a powerful presence that is as revealing about the world that shapes Alex’s inner self. Alex’s mom is a fleetingly presence, mostly out of focus, in the distance, or just outside the frame. We hear her voice, patient and concerned, but detached. Van Sant’s telling of Alex’s parents separation is wrenching, without any of the clichés of a common trauma childhood trauma.
The cast of characters that surrounds Alex quite literally come into focus, as opposed to show up in a scene. However short they’re appearance, they are none the less fully formed, and always captivating. Daniel Liu, as detective Richard Lu, interrogates Alex and his skateboarding friends. He appears on the scene as if in a cameo role, borrowed from an excellent HBO detective series we already know (and love). Macy (Lauren McKinney) captures our hearts. She is wise and perceptive beyond her years, but not improbably so. A fitting companion to Alex, and a helping hand in the midst of a disaster that suddenly happens. Her bemused, concerned and smittened attention to Alex is reassuring, both to him as well as us the viewers.
I never tired of watching Gabe Nevins. There’s something weird, disarming, intense, slack and beautiful about him. His gait slightly stooped, he shuffles-walks, and jumps into his tight-fit jeans in ways that are at once emblematic to adolescent boys, but are also wholly his. When he pushes a men to his eviscerating death, it is in-character.
Shit happens, dude!
In the end, Van Sant believably reconciles the gruesome accident that leads to the death of a rail yard security guard, with the fragments of Alex’s life. Most remarkably, he is doing so without fuss.
This is the movie to watch early weekend morning, immediately after waking up. This state of half wakefulness blurs the edges of a film and our own lives allowing us to briefly occupy and be occupied by soul of a character conjured up by this wonderful director.
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