Elephant (November 4/03)
After going mainstream over the last few years with movies like Finding Forrester and Psycho, Gus Van Sant seems to be making a concerted effort to move in the other direction. Gerry, released earlier this year, was a plotless examination of how two men react to becoming lost in an expansive desert. With Elephant, Van Sant continues to experiment visually but has churned out a film that's not nearly as bizarre and obtuse as Gerry.
Elephant transpires over the space of a few hours one fateful day at an American high school, where a couple of put-upon students are about to go on a Columbine-esque rampage. We meet several other students, including a popular jock and a sensitive photographer, as Van Sant's camera glides through the halls of this nameless institution.
The first thing one notices while watching Elephant is how visually striking the film is. The majority of the movie has been shot using a SteadiCam, and there are numerous uninterrupted takes that go on for several minutes. Perhaps because they require meticulous planning, the inclusion of such long shots are becoming more and more rare in contemporary cinema (thankfully, there is a select cadre of filmmakers keeping this technique alive, including Paul Thomas Anderson and Brian DePalma). But Van Sant embraces this aesthetically pleasing style, and peppers his film with many instances of dreamy camerawork. The audience is lulled into a celluloid reverie, which makes the brutal reality of the last 20-minutes even more crushing. Put it this way: Even if the film's content sucked, Elephant would still be worth a look if only for the memorable visuals.
It's in the film's contents that Van Sant falters, though. First and foremost, he's hired a cast that's comprised almost entirely of amateurs (Matt Malloy and Timothy Bottoms, as the principal and a parent, are the most notable exceptions). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the majority of these kids manage to bring a palpable sense of realism to their performances. But few of them manage to escape the confines of the stereotypes Van Sant has put them into, mostly because they just don't have the skill required to do so. Which leads into Elephant's most glaring flaw, that being Van Sant's tendancy to include overly simplistic elements. The majority of the characters can be effectively described using one or two words - ie the popular girls, the shy recluse, etc - but it's the killers that come off the most hackneyed. We see the two teens playing violent video games and watching a documentary on Hitler, and this is supposed to explain away their deviant behavior. One can only assume that Van Sant included such shallow character traits to safeguard himself against criticism (it's easy enough to imagine him placating detractors by saying, "look, they indulged in the worst that society has to offer!")
Having said that, Elephant is nonetheless a remarkably intriguing look at a modern day high school - not to mention one of the most interesting movies on a purely visceral level to come around in a while.
