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Halls of injustice
Scenes from an ordinary American high school are the backdrop for a school massacre story in Gus Van Sant's skilled but unsatisfying "Elephant."
By JOSHUA TANZER
Offoffoff.com
"Elephant" carries the tag line "an ordinary high school day. Except that it's not." And that's the problem — the movie is too mundane for its subject matter.
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| | | ELEPHANT | Written and directed by: Gus Van Sant.
Cast: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell, Jordan Taylor, Carrie Finklea, Nicole George, Larry Laverty, Brittany Mountain, Alicia Miles, Kristen Hicks, Bennie Dixon, Nathan Tyson, Timothy Bottoms, Matt Malloy, Elisa E. Williams, Jason Seitz, Elisa De La Motte, Sarah Bing.
Cinematography: Harris Savides.
Related links: Official site | | SCHEDULE | Walter Reade Theater
Lincoln Center, 65th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam
(212) 875-5600
Fri. Oct. 10, 9:15 pm
Sat. Oct. 11, 12:30 pm
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New York Film Festival 2003
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Gus Van Sant ("Drugstore Cowboy," "My Own Private Idaho," "Good Will Hunting") puts us in the middle of an average high school to follow about a dozen of its teenage charges through their day. Two of them are planning to end the day by massacring as many of the rest as possible.
While other students are playing football, talking about boys or suffering uncomfortably through gym class, Alex (Alex Frost) is spending his lunch break scouting out the cafeteria and taking notes on a small notepad.
"What are you writing?" a girl asks him.
"Oh, this?" he says. "It's my plan."
"For what?" she asks.
"Oh, you'll see," he says. It's the kind of ambiguous response that Americans are gradually learning not to take lightly.
Why are Alex and his buddy Eric (Erid Deulen) plotting their terrible vengeance? Oh, maybe there are a few scattered hints, but the film doesn't really go into that. The pair get about the same quick, voyeuristic, detail-poor introduction that all the other characters do.
Van Sant has cast actual high school kids from his hometown, Portland, Oregon, and based their parts on their own experiences — which leads to true performances but thin drama. These kids are all quite believable — the aspiring photographer, the cute bulimic girls, the hunky football hero and his doting girlfriend, the anguished son of an alcoholic father — but they are portrayed onscreen as shorthand versions of what we can only speculate are deeper human beings in reality. The same technique was used in this spring's "Raising Victor Vargas," with similar results.
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Cinematically, Van Sant has a lot of interesting stuff going on. While one or another of the teenagers is always front and center, people and places fade in and out of focus, giving the picture a slightly dreamlike quality. The sound does something similar — sometimes many adolescent conversations converge into a generalized murmur, from which fragmented words and phrases pop out to hint at what's being said. There are playful uses of slow motion and interlocking stories detached from one another in time and perspective. It's a very engaging film experience if not a fully formed story.
As much as the school massacre phenomenon has become an obsession of American cultural observers because it seems to touch on something indefinable but disturbing at our core (besides Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," there was this year's "Zero Day" and numerous plays including the following: 1, 2, 3), it's not clear what "Elephant" adds in terms of understanding the psyche of those involved. The scenes when the well-armed malcontents show up to carry out their plans are undeniably intense and troubling, but they haven't been given a very strong setup that would make sense of what we see.
Nonetheless, the film won top honors at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and it may look quite different to European eyes than to American ones. For some, in countries where it's rare for teenagers to drive cars, never mind own guns, it may provide a glimpse into an unfamiliar culture, and that may somehow fit the weapons-blazing conclusion in the European mind. But to Americans, the people we see are not exotic in the least — they're exactly the people we went to school with, and we may even see them as abstract types rather than complex individuals. "Elephant" seems to float ethereally around our reality rather than dive in.
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OCTOBER 8, 2003
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Reader comments on Elephant:
HI ALEX from Megan Saul, Nov 10, 2003
awsome from Jessy, Jan 6, 2004
read: from rebekca, May 1, 2004
yo! from brina and meredith, Jul 4, 2004
JOHN from Lana, Jul 5, 2004
WHOA from Sloane, Aug 2, 2004
Acadia from alex, Nov 24, 2004
wow!! from lauren, Dec 4, 2004
John from haley, Dec 7, 2004
BOYS from TJ, May 15, 2005
john from willie, Oct 11, 2005
wow from erin, Feb 4, 2006
GRRR.... from sydney<3JohnRobinson, May 3, 2006
whata from idkwhat, Sep 19, 2006
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