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Close-up, in conversation, he has the startled look of Tony Perkins, the diffident manner of Andy Warhol and, sporting orange sneakers and a blue hoodie and hole-in-the-knee jeans, the dress code of a 13-year-old kid. Yes, at the ripe age of 56, Gus Van Sant is a curious man-child, with a personality to match – one second boyishly shy and halting, the next maturely assertive and eloquent. So maybe it's inevitable that a guy so elusive, so all over the map, should make movies to match.
Consider his latest offspring, the very odd couple he released last year. Both are damn good, yet no two movies could be more radically different in their style and their reception. Milk, a readily accessible biopic fronted by a major star, garnered immediate Oscar attention, will figure prominently in tomorrow's awards fest and can still be seen in theatres around the continent. Paranoid Park, a densely atmospheric étude with a non-professional cast, opened on a few screens in the early spring and promptly disappeared without a trace. The high level of artistry is the same in each, and let's make the argument: Not another director working today could equal that level in such totally contrasting pictures. Still, one film thrives in the mainstream while the other fades on the margins. For Van Sant, though, that's not the exceptional chapter of a single year – no, it's pretty much the recurring story of his whole career.
His middle-class father was a travelling salesman, always on the move, and, aesthetically speaking, it's tempting to say the same of the son – certainly, the distance between Milk, an American traditional in technique, and Paranoid Park, experimental in look and European in feel, is a considerable jaunt. But perhaps that's too easy, too pat. After all, unlike his dad, Van Sant has definitely put down roots, settled into his identity as a gay man, into his long-time residence in Portland, Ore., and into his role as serious filmmaker in an era of trivial films. Of course, at every point on this triangular definition – the sexual orientation, the faraway address, the lofty mission – he's an outsider looking in and butting up against formidable barriers. And that perspective surely explains why his work, while varying dramatically in manner and style, has remained so consistent in content and theme.
Right from the start in his earliest movies – Mala Noche with its migrant workers, Drugstore Cowboy with its junkies, My Own Private Idaho with its male hustlers – he was drawn to characters who were outsiders themselves, mainly alienated kids flirting with self-destruction and seeking what they most lacked, desperate for some sense of community beyond the social norm. At the time, in the mid-eighties, Hollywood had lost any interest in that topic. So Van Sant made his pictures independently. Inevitably, when not only critics but also audiences warmed to his work, the studios came courting and made him an offer. Inevitably too, the cliché insists that his subsequent labours in Tinseltown are flawed and commercially tainted.
Sure, these movies vary in quality, but the cliché ignores the larger point that his perspective, almost an obsession by now, hadn't changed a millimetre. Again and again, the figure of the outsider dominates. Sometimes they want in, sometimes not, but they're always prominently on view at the centre of the screen – in the big-thumbed hitchhiker of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, in the small-town media queen of To Die For, and in the street-tough math whiz of Good Will Hunting. This last flick earned Van Sant his first Oscar attention, and for good reason: It's slick but also satisfying, with a tweaked climax perfectly engineered to fit the genre that Hollywood most loves – the tragedy with a happy ending.
In turn, that flirtation with Oscar won him the chance to blow a big budget on a weird indulgence – a recast but otherwise shot-for-shot duplication of Hitchcock's Psycho. Dismissed at the time as little more than a Warholian exercise in pop irony, it seems in retrospect a kind of watershed for Van Sant, a defiant farewell-to-all-that, a goodbye to the logic of montage and the wide-shot/medium/close-up tradition, all the stuff that Hitchcock had inherited and thoroughly mastered.
Indeed, that's precisely the stuff Van Sant was poised to abandon. In the interim, he'd been dabbling in photography, playing music in a band, even writing a novel, almost as if the filmmaker was breaking himself down into film's component parts, into sight and sound and story. Then in his so-called “death trilogy” – Gerry, Elephant, Last Days – the components got reassembled in daring, fascinating, frustrating patterns. Gone were the straightforward narrative and the fast-paced edits, replaced by extended silences, by minimal dialogue, by long takes with fixed stares, by eerie scores that twittered and ground and screeched. Although the influences could be traced to Europeans like Bela Tarr and Chantal Akerman, Van Sant made them his own – clearly, no other name American director was working this way.
What's more, he was applying these seemingly arcane methods to tragically familiar subject matter ripped from mass-media headlines – to the Columbine high-school massacre in Elephant, to Kurt Cobain's suicide in Last Days. Yet, in these self-termed “investigative dramas,” his goal is to transcend journalism's cozy paradigms and smug answers, burrowing down into those deeper layers of complexity where certainty shrinks but understanding grows. Withholding from the audience the reassuring comforts of a linear storyline, easy emotions or a final catharsis, what the movies offer instead, at least to the susceptible, is an intensely atmospheric, powerfully rhythmic experience that grabs hard and holds you fast under its mesmerizing spell. Simultaneously cerebral and visceral, the films seem not quite real and yet never false but somehow partaking of both – yes, rather like the prospect of death itself.
Predictably, Oscar ignored these pictures; just as predictably, Cannes took notice, awarding Elephant its Palme d'or. Someone else took notice too, a writer who brought his own unorthodox methods to the same big themes of cultural alienation, addiction, violence, despair and suicide. The late David Foster Wallace formed with Van Sant a mutual admiration society. In fact, dating back to 1998, there exists online a transcription of a weird telephone conversation they once had, their shared sensibilities warily circling each other, the director recording the dialogue, the writer as self-conscious as ever – one fated to survive and the other, sadly, to die by his own hand. It makes for poignant reading.
And, those latest efforts from Van Sant, Milk and Paranoid Park, make for poignant viewing. The Oscar-nominated movie reverses his experimental trend, while the disappeared gem continues and even accelerates it. But both focus on the outsider again, both deal in death and both see their protagonist – Milk's proud gay activist who dies violently, Paranoid Park's troubled young skateboarder who kills accidentally – engaged in that familiar quest for community, for the support of like-minded souls. The man finds solace in politics, and becomes a martyr to a growing cause. The kid finds solace in writing, perhaps to become an artist with a guilty conscience. And, although Harvey Milk is played by the illustrious Sean Penn and the teenage skater by some callow amateur named Gabe Nevins, both the man's and the child's performances are equally subtle, equally superb – no doubt a tribute to the man-child who directed them.
Tomorrow night, Milk will be everywhere, on everyone's lips, the popular martyr vying for gold. And Paranoid Park will be nowhere, the guilt-ridden kid never once mentioned, an outsider looking in. Like any loving father, Gus Van Sant will have a rooting interest in his different offspring, headed out on such different paths, and, like any real artist, he will wonder even in victory how to define success.