Elephant (2003)

ELEPHANT
**** (out of ****)
a film review by
Richard A. Zwelling

Those who know me well will say that I am not particularly squeamish when it comes to disturbing films. I consider Requiem for a Dream, Blue Velvet, and Chinatown as a few of my all-time favorites. Even if I feel slightly uncomfortable during a film, I also feel a sort of perverse enjoyment in the fact that the cinema is so good.

The following statement, therefore, is all the more powerful: Elephant is one of most unsettling, disturbing, and near-unwatchable movies I have ever seen. This is the first time I have ever considered leaving a film because it was almost too much to bear. This film dares you to engage in intellectual rumination and then brutally blindsides you with a force that shatters any possibility of rational explanation.

Director Gus Van Sant has always been partial to films that explore the troubled world of young adults (Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, for example). It should come as no surprise, then, that the Columbine High School massacre of 1999 would spark his interest in a film. There is something remarkably and painfully different about this look into the events, however. There is no media to tell you what to think. There are no parents (save two irrelevant exceptions) to give outside perspective. Indeed, outside of the two exceptions, every person in the film is either a student or an employee at the fictionalized, yet symbolic school.

Stylistically, there are no fancy camera techniques to preach any messages. Many sequences are long, unbroken takes that linger when we would normally expect a cut of some kind. There are no rhetorically fused characters. These people are ordinary teenagers, teachers, and staff that you know from your high school experience. Most disturbing, there is no sensationalized violence of any kind. Death here is nothing more than bodies dropping, suddenly lifeless where a living breathing soul stood just seconds before. The finality and senselessness of it tears into your soul while you scream to get away.

In his outstanding analysis of the film, Roger Ebert cited a quote from director François Truffaut which says that it is impossible to create anti-war cinema, because you are captivated by the violence, even if you think it is wrong. This film ruthlessly refutes Truffaut's claim. When the violence happens, it is impossible to exhibit even a morbid fascination. It is that devastating and brutal.

Anyone familiar with the events of Columbine will know where the film is heading, but it does not matter, because Elephant so effectively drops the audience into the middle of the tragic day that all of a sudden, TV, movies, parents, and indeed any outside take on what "really" happened is absolutely irrelevant. It is to Van Sant's credit that he challenges the audience to scrutinize people, rooms, and anything they can find to locate answers. In the end, he thwarts all expectations, and this makes the film even more incendiary.

I have no doubt that there will be tirades against this film, because it boldly contributes the theory that maybe...just maybe...there is no explanation for what happened. No Marilyn Manson, no violent video games, no Nazi propaganda...maybe it was random chance. In this way, Elephant could certainly be dubbed the anti-Bowling for Columbine for its refusal to address any issues at all. Certainly, we begin to realize that who lived and who died was often determined by blind chance. This is painfully evident in the sequence involving a kid named Benny.

The title of the film can be interpreted in one of two ways. The first regards the proverbial elephant that resides in the living room while everyone tries hard to ignore it, despite its undeniable presence. Van Sant's explanation, however, relates to a parable that appears in Buddhist teachings. The story tells of a group of blind men, each of whom examines a different part of an elephant. Each man becomes convinced that because of his knowledge of his particular body part, he understands the entire animal. The story fits in aptly with the slanted, incomplete interpretations we received from many angles following the actual Columbine tragedy.

For the film's production, real high-school students (most from the Portland, Oregon area, where the film was shot) were used, some with no prior acting experience. Much of the dialogue was contributed by the performers' own experiences and was often improvised. Filming took place at a recently closed Portland high school and was completed in only twenty days in November 2002.

Then there is the stunning, breathtaking cinematography of Harris Savides. The images he captures are ones that provide inescapable intimacy. We slowly and deliberately traverse the hills and streets surrounding the school. We are given ample time to view both the emptied and crowded school hallways. We often undergo sudden point-of-view shifts and are drawn excruciatingly close to the small details of various students' lives.

This film is filled with unsettling paradoxes. The look is bleakly surreal, and yet at the same time about as realistic as it gets. The technical elements fuse together to provide just the right impact, and yet in some ways, the film is as unmanipulative as one could imagine. In the end, the film has an earth-shattering message, but that message is that there is no message. It treats the characters in a way that would, in a standard film, provoke narrative expectation from an audience, but then crushes those expectations by showing the characters as nothing more than ordinary people falling victim to fate.

Elephant is, quite simply, an unforgettable cinematic experience. I will most likely go weeks turning the film's images over in my mind. In consideration of the fraudulent, incessant clamor the media generated almost five years ago, the film not only refuses to supply answers, but shows just how far removed (and far off) the media might have been. In the inescapable terror of shots being fired, blood painting walls, and bodies suddenly collapsing, nothing matters except the horror of not knowing whether you will be alive for another day, and this is what was so rarely addressed (and what this film so painfully depicts).

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X-RAMR-ID: 36367
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1221847
X-RT-TitleID: 1123443
X-RT-AuthorID: 7583
X-RT-RatingText: 4/4