Review
ELEPHANT
Starring Alex Frost, Eric Deulen and John Robinson
Written, directed and edited by Gus Van Sant
Opens Friday, November 28
Uptown Screen
About halfway through Elephant there is a scene in which a teenage boy, a social outcast, walks across his high school cafeteria drawing a diagram in a small notebook. As the camera tracks alongside him, dissonant noise rises on the soundtrack until it reaches an almost ear-splitting crescendo. Momentarily, before an abrupt cut to the next scene, the boy clutches his head, as if suffering some unbearable mental anguish.
There are literally hundreds of tiny moments like this in Gus Van Sant’s conundrum of a movie, in which every frame brims over with seemingly significant contradictions. Elephant, which has been tagged too simply as a film "about Columbine," – the site of the Colorado high school shootings that left 13 dead – has already generated enough controversy for its lifetime – it won the Palme D’Or earlier this year at Cannes, where it was also vilified as "anti-American" by at least one prominent American critic (Variety’s Todd McCarthy).
First, let’s say that the only people who actually care whether Elephant is anti-American, whatever that phrase may be taken to mean, are Americans. The rest of us can at least pretend to be open to the film without resorting to dismissive critical labels. As to the second part of the equation, that Elelphant is about Columbine, it’s better to consider the distinction that the film is actually about how we – as a society – perceive and represent events like Columbine.
For one thing, Elephant is set not in Littleton, Colorado, but in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon. This setting reveals that Van Sant is not exactly concerned with docudrama in Elephant, although he is interested in the sociopolitical landscape of an average, middle-class American high school. Moreover, Elephant takes the facts that we know about Columbine and transforms them into a formally distinguished work of art that questions our desire for an explanation of those facts at every turn.
Elephant continually re-examines a short period of time in one day, showing us many of the same moments from divergent perspectives. Each of these roughly corresponds with the point of view of a different student or group of students at the school – as the perspectives shift, we realize that each one omits information that is revealed by the others. This, in turn, leads us to reflect upon the way that stories are constructed, and how difficult it is to consider all the points of view at our disposal.
For example, the scene described at the beginning of this review is significant both because of what it says about that particular moment – in which no one comes to the boy’s aid or even cares to notice his affliction – and also what it suggests about the future. For we have already been given enough information to know that this boy, along with an accomplice, is plotting to unleash unspeakable violence upon his classmates. In this sense, there is little suspense in watching Elephant, even though much of the early part of the film creates an atmosphere of intense dread.
The manner in which information is released in Elephant – from the order in which the characters are introduced right through to the detached approach to the violence in its inevitable climax – may lead us to think of the film as the antithesis of a thriller. Watching Elephant, we are initially led to believe that suspense is being built in the conventional manner – because we believe we know how the film will conclude – but nothing plays out exactly as we think it will.
In addition, there’s no pat psychological explanation for the killers’ actions. We’re subtly presented with a number of factors – bullying, social alienation, lack of affection, adolescent nihilism, elitist anger and perhaps even an artistic temperament – that may suggest a rationale, but even a combination of all these factors isn’t sufficient to make up the profile of a psychopath. After all, many teenagers are routinely affected by the same problems, but they don’t all order guns off the Internet and slaughter their classmates.
Elephant is about two things – the pain of adolescence, in all its awkwardness, boredom and insecurity, and the unsettling complexity of human nature. With a cast comprised largely of non-professional actors, the film accurately depicts the misery of high school for all concerned, but particularly for those on the lower social strata. The improvised dialogue places this film in the here and now, but it is also universal in its concerns and gives us plenty of ideas to chew on.
Finally, a warning: Elephant is both the most minimal and the most formally inventive film I’ve seen this year. The first time you watch it, the fragmented, elliptical structure makes it difficult to comprehend the chronology and geography of events. Van Sant, who wrote, directed and edited the film, gives us enough visual and aural cues to interpret these things intuitively, but it’s much easier to get a sense of Elephant’s expansion of time and space in a second viewing.
Anatomically dissecting a brief period of time, Van Sant delivers a beautiful work of art about an extraordinarily ugly disruption to an otherwise ordinary day. Dodging clichés, Elephant looks at several hideous facets of our society and our nature, but also captures moments of unfathomable tenderness. Much like life, there’s just no simple way to explain it. |
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