From acclaimed filmmaker Gus Van Sant comes the moving story of a violent incident that rocks the students and faculty at a high school in Portland, Oregon.
Gus van Sant's cold and disturbing depiction of a Columbine-style school massacre is something of a flawed gem. The jury at Cannes were sufficiently impressed to award it the Palme D'or and Best Director award in 2003. But the film fails, on some levels, to live up to its hype. In the end it's nothing more than a well filmed experimental movie, examining the everyday lives of teenagers, rather than saying anything new about the psychopathic violence they occasionally commit.
One of the weakest aspects of the film comes from the particularly poor performances from the young amateur actors. Some of their dialogue is improvised and sadly it shows, particularly in a group of bitchy teenage girls who argue about who's going out with whom. Having said this, there are some very effective scenes involving the youths, most notably when we discover that the killers, two teenage boys, are involved in a romantic relationship with each other. This is revealed in a subtle and well handled moment of tenderness in a school shower, and adds a potentially new dimension to the story.
But herein lays some further problems. It is suggested that the unhappy murderers are taking revenge for some form of homophobia that has been inflicted upon them by the heterosexual majority of the school. Indeed, there is even an unsettling class discussion about how to spot a gay man walking in the street. But this is an underdeveloped narrative thread that should have been an interesting aspect to the killer's motive, but instead becomes an unconvincing whispered message that dissolves as soon as it has been implied. And as some critics at the time pointed out, there are millions of gay teenagers in the world that don't choose mass slaughter as a way to express their anger against the bigoted members of society.
However, there are some truly remarkable aspects to Elephant. The film feels like an uneasy dream, with the cameras following students around the school and repeating events from different points of view. There are some superbly handled moments of disorientation when a schoolboy (John Robinson) starts to realise what devastation is about to unfold and tries to warn people not to go into the building. Some don't listen to him, and he is left outside, shouting at them to stay away.
The title "Elephant" pays homage to a 1989 BBC drama which presents destructive sectarian violence as "the elephant in the room". It isn't very apparent what problem forms the "elephant" in this film. It could be the rise in school violence, or the dangers of homophobia in the classroom. This is not one of Gus van Sant's best pieces of work, but it's certainly one of his most interesting. It is a shame, therefore, that it fails to follow through on the potent questions and issues it raises.
It's always a challenge for a filmmaker to respond to a public tragedy without seeming exploitative, but Gus Van Sant manages just that in "Elephant," his film about a Columbine-like school attack. Van Sant's film follows a handful of students as they go about their days in interlocking patterns, crossing each others' paths but never quite coming together. He does this with an innovative time-jumping structure and the smooth tracking movement of his camera. The camera follows a student or a group of students through a scene, often lingering somewhere behind their heads as they walk through the halls. Then the film jumps back in time a few minutes to follow another student who had passed through the shot in the previous scene. In this way, the film establishes a sense of the environment and of the lives moving through the school. The eventual killers are treated just like the other students, emphasizing that they emerge from this environment, that their actions and everyday behaviors are part of it too. Van Sant rejects and even mocks conventional media explanations -- violent video games, rock music, homosexuality -- and advances the idea that such violent acts are both utterly ordinary and utterly unknowable. There is a real gap, the film seems to be saying, between the horrible reality of violence and the psychological or sociological explanations which are so often used to explain it. This is an amazing, deep, and powerful film, affecting and beautiful even as it tackles complex issues and ideas on a level otherwise unseen in mainstream American film. Van Sant's current streak of genius continues unabated.
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Winner of the Palme D'Or Award at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, this controversial film by Gus van Sant portrays two days in the life of a suburban American high school that is set to become the scene of a Columbine-style massacre. Semi-improvised, using unknown teenagers rather than professional actors, the film adopts a fly-on-the-wall approach that surveys the various cliques and social strata of the school in a non-judgmental, documentary-like way. Against this background, two misfit friends, Eric (Eric Deulen) and Alex (Alex Frost), who spend their free-time collecting Nazi iconography and playing ultra-violent video games, are coolly planning an armed ambush on the school, drawing working diagrams of the school refectory during study period and buying weapons over the Internet. The film marks a return for Van Sant to the low-key style of his early independent films.
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