Elephant (2003)

IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards

ELEPHANT

Directed by Gus Van Sant

Rated R, 81 minutes

Gus Van Sant's Elephant is a blank page he spools out for us to record our own reactions to the horrors of Columbine. Its lack of content, emotion, and analysis can be maddening or mesmerizing, brilliant or bollocks, depending on the sympathies of the viewer. It is minimalist art, a canvas as expressionless as the backs of the heads of the high school kids it spends much of its time focused on. It is a movie that requires an audience's input to finish its job, a movie that depends on the kindness of strangers.

Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho) knows that everyone seeing this film will bring to it the vivid awareness of what happened that day in Littleton. So when his camera begins following random students around the grounds and buildings of a big suburban high school, we are drawn along, aware of the dull chill of wondering if this one or that one could be one of the killers. There are endless tracking shots as teenagers wander down corridors like purposeless fugitives from The West Wing. The camera gets bored and finds another group or another loner and hangs with that subject for a while, then moves on.

Pointlessness is much of the point. Who will ultimately die and who will live are outcomes as random and meaningless as the drift of the camera. Whys are not a part of the conversation, only whats and wheres.

When the lethal violence finally does erupt, it is as dispassionate and joyless as the stubbing out of cigarettes. And while it would be overstating the case to say that there is not much more emotion from the victims than from the perpetrators, there's some truth to that. People flee the locations of massacre, but with very little screaming and virtually no shouts of warning to the people they encounter in their flight. One boy, alerted to stay away by the fatigue-clad, weapons-toting killers he encounters as they stroll into the school, does in turn try to warn others, but he's like the skinny little guy in the old Philadelphia Bulletin ads trying to warn of disaster while everyone else's heads are buried in their newspapers.

The movie keeps doubling back on itself, revisiting the same scene from different angles, but it is not the kind of repetition that brings a fuller understanding with its multiple perspectives. What it does convey is déjà vu, a troubling sense that we've been here before and will very likely be back here again.

When we finally meet the killers, we've already seen them around school. Alex (Alex Frost) has endured some mild hazing, not the sort of thing that by itself would be likely to send a kid home for a gun. But then we really don't know what sends a kid home for a gun, and neither, he has confessed, does Van Sant. Some of the controversy that swirls around this movie has to do with that absence of insight: is it forthright and refreshingly honest for a filmmaker to make a movie about a tragedy like this without offering an opinion as to motive or meaning, or is it just a cop-out?

There are opinions expressed, of course. Everything a filmmaker chooses to show reflects an opinion. The movie begins with a car weaving down a residential street. Is it the killers, drunk with the excitement of what they're about to do? No, it's a middle-aged man (Timothy Bottoms, the only recognizable face in the film) drunk with booze, driving his teen-aged son (John Robinson) to school in the morning. The son makes him stop, and takes the wheel. Youthful initiative and responsibility, the taking of control in bad circumstances.

Homosexuality is an issue. A class discusses whether you can tell by observation whether someone is gay. The prevailing mood of the kids is a bored, what's-the-big-deal tolerance. Later, in one of the movie's most discussed moments, the killers have a sexual encounter in the shower together before heading out to kill. The point is made that this, too, is a first: "I've never even kissed anyone before," murmurs Eric (Eric Deulen) as their mouths come together under the shower spray.

This movie - any movie - is filled with choices. As much as Van Sant might want to imply that his are as random as the killers' choices of who is to die, it ain't so. In the Columbine case, the boys were said to be influenced by the music of Marilyn Manson. Here, Van Sant has Alex play Beethoven's gentle Fur Elise on the piano, while Eric plays a murderous video game. They watch a TV documentary on Nazi propaganda. They have breakfast. They unwrap the assault rifles they've ordered over the internet.

"Most importantly, have fun, man," Eric says as they head out to do the day's business.

The movie won this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's a love-it-or-hate-it thing. Most of the actors are real high school kids who improvised their own dialogue. The artlessness of the movie's technique protects it from artificiality, but saps it of shape. The elephant of the title refers to a 1989 BBC short film of the same name, which dealt with the omnipresence of violence in Northern Ireland. Like the elephant in the living room, habitual societal violence is a topic to which we can't allow familiarity to blind us.

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X-Language: en
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