Release Date: October 24, 2003
Starring: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell, Jordan Taylor, Carrie Finklea, Nicole George, Brittany Mountain, Alicia Miles, Kristen Hicks, Nathan Tyson, Bennie Dixon
Directed by: Gus Van Sant
Written by: Gus Van Sant
Distributed by: Fine Line Features
MPAA Rating: R (disturbing violent content, language, brief sexuality, drug use -- all involving teens)
There are at least a hundred surprising things about writer-director Gus Van Sant's Elephant, but I'll tell you which one got me the most: Nowhere in this Spartan, 81-minute docudrama about American high school shootings does Van Sant offer a shred of explanation for what's going on, a formal choice that is actually quite daring. The thing about us humans is that the unknowable makes us uncomfortable, and we spend a lot of time searching for explanations where, in fact, there may not be any. Credit Van Sant with resisting the temptation to explain away, which would surely be his prerogative as the creator of this fictional take on the events at Columbine High School in 1999. The film is actually stronger because of its ambiguities.
Van Sant's film (which won the Palme d'Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival) moves forward and backward in time around a fictional shooting in a Portland, Ore., high school, a striking, minimalist production made in the same vein as the director's previous film, Gerry. There is a lot of empty space and great stretches of time between bits of dialogue. The camera wanders about the garish, almost prison-like high school setting with a restless, attention-starved curiosity in one long take after another. And the only numbers to be heard on the soundtrack are several mournful renditions of Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata.
The movie begins like most television shows, in media res, or in the middle of things (further enhancing the film's television-show aesthetic is the HBO Films banner in the opening credits and the boxy, nonstandard 1.33-to-1 ratio of the icy, sterile cinematography by Harris Savides). It defies conventional narrative. The camera moves through the school, almost aimlessly following different students in a variety of mundane activities: some boys playing a football game in the schoolyard, three girls picking around the edges of their cafeteria lunches ("some kids like this stuff," they scoff), another kid working on a photography project in the school darkroom.
The director's intentions are to build up a picture of overwhelming, almost heartbreaking normalcy before thrusting the world-shattering violence of the massacre in the final third of the movie. This everyday quality is an atmosphere he captures perfectly, down to the inanities of the gossip that passes for conversation in high school corridors. Three girls idling in the hallway spy a good-looking boy pass by them. "He's so cute," they coo, and then they wonder about his girlfriend, and whether it's true she slapped another girl just for ogling him.
At times I wondered whether Elephant might not have been more powerful if it hadn't involved school shootings, because Van Sant has recreated high school on an almost elemental level. Audiences will confirm this. The characters fit too neatly into clearly defined stereotypes, yes, but then again high school is built on that sort of reckless classification. You're either a jock or a nerd or an artist or a slacker or one of a dozen other groups, whether you like it or not, and Van Sant's characters live up to that truth.
But the shootings are a part of the movie, even if they only turn up in the last 20 minutes of the movie. Part of the suspense comes in knowing this is going to happen -- early in the film, we see the two boys responsible, Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen), carrying bags full of weapons as they walk into the school in the middle of the day. As they pass by another boy, John (John McFarland), one of them utters that fateful phrase: "Get out of here, and don't come back." Then Van Sant cuts back in time, developing the other characters further, as their paths cross and overlap in a kind of random geometry, always stopping just short of the moment when Alex and Eric begin their killing spree.
Van Sant does give in to a few indulgences. The cast is made up entirely of unknowns (almost all of whom play characters that have their same first names) who are just a bit too good-looking. They all have the hollow, malnourished look that makes it seem as if they got lost on their way to shooting a Calvin Klein commercial, which is an ironic touch because the cinematographer, Harris Savides, used to shoot those ads. And while the director doesn't attempt to provide a motive for Alex and Eric's horrific plan, he does embellish a few of the details: they're outsiders who spend their time together in a depressing, self-contained kind of way. Alex plays Beethoven on the piano while Eric fools around with a shoot-em-up game on a laptop computer. They order their guns over the Internet, a nod to the ease with which one can acquire high-powered weapons as presented in Michael Moore's distant, more belligerent cousin of a documentary, Bowling for Columbine. And the two boys share a kiss, a possible homoerotic gesture, before setting out on their grisly task.
The really chilling scene comes here, when the two boys pour over a blueprint of the school, having planned out which hallways they will use as their firing ranges. They talk remorselessly about the killing they will do, and even describe constructing homemade bombs to direct the traffic of fleeing students and teachers to maximize their killing potential.
The massacre itself arrives with the air of anticlimax, a sensation that will be even more overwhelming for those who are more familiar with Hollywood-produced actioners. There is surprisingly little blood and none of that gratuitous slow-motion photography. A lot of ambient noise makes it onto the soundtrack, so the assault rifles that the boys use sound disturbingly loud and menacing. And there is a strange mixture of chaos and calm in the reaction of the victims: they run for their lives, but not in the massive, panicky, hysteria-filled crowds you would imagine. Just one here, two there, another three over there, sprinting through smoke-filled hallways as Alex and Eric stalk them with a chilling kind of godlike stoicism.
Despite the disturbing nature of the production (and it only gets more so as it goes along), Elephant ends too quickly. The story is not finished when the movie does end, and many viewers may feel as though they've been had by Van Sant. Not so. He has clearly made Elephant to be the antithesis of what a Hollywood movie about this same subject would look like, and anything that might come after the end of this film would simply be the narrative frivolities that make us comfortable. But just as he resists the temptation to explain the great unknown, Van Sant also refuses to neatly wrap things up for his audience, a wonderful finishing touch on what is the director's best work in years.
-- Craig Roush (crr225@nyu.edu)