Seen On Screen
Sleepers you might have missed
By T.H. Freedman

We’re heading into fall, with the inevitable barrage of year-end prestige projects and Oscar-bait. But before you laminate those top-ten lists, here are three sleepers from the first half of 2008 that you might have missed.

Paranoid Park
IFC Films
(2008)

Given his penchant for depicting disaffected youth (My Own Private Idaho, Elephant, To Die For), it makes perfect sense for director Gus Van Sant to bring Blake Nelson’s young adult novel Paranoid Park to the big screen. Filmed on location in and around Portland, Paranoid Park revolves around a suburban teenage boy from a broken home who is tangentially part of the skater-punk subculture, and his involvement in a tragic event near the ominous skateboard park the movie is named for. Exploring familiar themes of isolation, guilt, class, and adolescent sexuality, Van Sant (an Oregon native) infuses the project with a haunting visual beauty, as well as a surprising timeliness and resonance. The young cast is largely comprised of non-actors (reportedly found through open casting calls on MySpace), and Van Sant coaxes realistic, slightly improvisational performances from them. Van Sant also splices in visually stunning digital footage of skateboarders from various locales (think Endless Summer, but with sk8tr boy pathos), which enhances the mesmerizing elegance of the film, and smartly parallels the protagonist’s alternating anguish and indifference. Like adolescence itself, Paranoid Park is filled with alienation, delinquency, pain, beauty, and the slightest glimmer of hope. Perhaps the crowning achievement of the film, then, is that Van Sant has managed to pull off what last year’s overrated Juno could not: portraying how kids today really talk and act. Van Sant’s finest film since To Die For,and the best American film of the year, to date.

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The Visitor
Overture Films
(2008)

Avoiding the sophomore slump in a big way, writer-director Thomas McCarthy follows up his 2003 indie hit The Station Agent with another poignant, nuanced film about loneliness, loss, and transformation. The Visitor tells the story of Walter Vale, a sad-sack college professor (Richard Jenkins, best known as the ghost dad on Six Feet Under). After being away for some time, Vale returns to his musty Manhattan apartment and finds an immigrant couple mistakenly, and illegally, living there. Rather than kick the couple to the curb, Vale allows them to temporarily crash with him and impart obligatory cross-cultural life lessons, including teaching him the art of drumming. But instead of veering into maudlin Bagger Vance country, McCarthy wisely limits the contrivances to the initial premise, and employs subtlety and humor to tell this New York story, which centers on the unlikely friendship between Vale and the young immigrant man, Tarek. Shot largely on location in New York, The Visitor knowingly captures the humble city grays and gritty locales like Washington Square Park, a jazz club in the East Village, a Queens diner, and, most effectively, the Broadway-Lafayette subway platform. Jenkins turns in a heartbreaking, Oscar-caliber performance as Vale, who—unlike the string of wifeless burn-out profs in recent cinema such as Sideways and Smart People—has real flaws; he is boring (not just bored), and not a particularly gifted academic. The relationship between Vale and Tarek (Haaz Sleiman, also excellent) grows more profound when Tarek is suddenly arrested and taken to a detention center to await potential deportation. Although The Visitor might serve as a restrained commentary on this country’s post-9/11 immigration policies, at its heart the film is about reconnecting to humanity. And I can think of no better place to do that than a New York City subway platform.

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The Strangers
Rogue Pictures
(2008)

Finally, something scarier than a narcissistic yuppie couple in love. Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) arrive at an isolated vacation cabin in the woods shortly after hitting a snag in their seemingly idyllic relationship. Their troubles are just beginning, though, as they are slowly stalked and terrorized by three mysterious strangers in scary, I repeat, scary, masks. While the plot is thin, first time writer-director Bryan Bertino favors austere suspense and simplicity over gratuitous gore, and The Strangers contains some of the most frightening imagery in recent film history. Bertino also makes expert use of silence (the strangers rarely speak), such as in the already infamous scene where “the Man in the Mask” first appears on screen. He stands ghostlike in the background in a darkened hallway, as an unsuspecting Kristen faces the camera in the foreground. The scene lasts several minutes, and when the Man slowly tilts his burlap-bagged head in unison with hers, your blood will run cold. With nods to several classic 1970s horror movies, including a gravelly voice-over introduction cribbed from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre informing us that The Strangers supposedly was “inspired by true events,” you have been warned.

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