Gus Van Sant, I'm glad you're trying to redeem yourself. My first exposure to the man was Psycho. The remake. The film that took a masterpiece of low-budget cinema, slathered it in honky-tonk neon, recruited a frat boy and Ellen's girlfriend to play iconic roles, and made one and only one update to the '90s: "Let me get my Walkman."
2009, even if the Oscars don't award it, is Van Sant's year. He's not going to be mainstream, but he's now Hollywood-friendly-indie. And how can you not feel warm and fuzzy after watching Milk? It's a love letter to gay activist Harvey Milk. The screenplay for the most part covers his zest, his chutzpah, his honesty. As he becomes a local hero, it doesn't shy from his difficulties with intimacy. Sean Penn deserves all the praise he's gotten; you forget you're watching a performance. Milk's stride and gesticulations may be alien to Penn, but he doesn't rely on the tics to find his character. Plus, it's nice to see him smile. It's a movie all about the men -- James Franco's coolness and Emile Hirsch's rebel-rebel vigor balance out well.
Van Sant prefers us to interpret psychology without showing it, a fine trick when it's about the people. But Dan White (Josh Brolin) gives us little to understand the progression from Point A, team player, to Point C, assassin. More probing might have kept him from seeming like the villain of this fairy tale.
Paranoid Park fits more into the dream-like state that defines most of Van Sant's films. A skater kid accidentally kills a security guard when hopping onto a train, and it stunts him emotionally until he gets it out, not with the police, but on paper. And really, on film. Some critics were in love with this film, maybe in response to the fear that this type of Sundance fare will be eclipsed by safe-indie Milk. Van Sant gives us internal conflict, again, without the psychology. In a cycle of disconnecting (starting with the severed guard's body) and reconnecting with the world and ordinary teenage-hood, the film veers around a lot. The acting's rough, the redemption's uninspired. What lingers are moments of clarity: the gracefulness of skaters in parks and city pipes, gliding along in a hallucination, swooping up to the heavens and returning to terra firma in a concentrated yet effortless descent.
After the accident, there's a scene in the shower (much stronger than Psycho 2.0's desecration of Hitchcock with comically red blood like Kool-Aid), where the kid responsible lets the water drip down his long hair for two straight minutes. Here's one scene where no words are necessary. Who knew a moment of such stillness could be so riveting?
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