Elephant examines a day in the life of a high school just before a
Columbine-like shooting spree turns the idyll upside down. But even without the
topicality and drama of that, it would be well worth a look, and a welcome
return to form by director Gus Van Sant.
           Van Sant started out as a strong,
independent personality with films like Drugstore
Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho,
but wound up directing Finding Forrester and
Good Will Hunting. And then came Gerry.
           There’s a reason you probably
haven’t heard of Gerry before: The
film consists almost entirely of two guys walking around lost in a desert,
saying next to nothing. The movie seems to serve no purpose other than to let
the director do the same. Van Sant appears desperate to strike out for unknown
territory, and for some kind of artistic epiphany.
           Gerry
never really goes beyond beautiful languor. There is some pseudo-profound
talk of a “thing” at the end of the trail, and some other embarrassingly-101
nods at deepness.
           Elephant,
you might say, is the thing at the end of the trail. Many of the same motifs
are used, but this time they have found a proper home. Huge chunks of time are
spent following a random sampling of students as they walk for minutes at a
time through the halls.
           There are times where this feels a
little aimless and undirected, but the cumulative effect is to saturate you
with the lives of the students. Van Sant reclaims them from the distance of the
surveillance video of the Columbine massacre, from the editorials, and from the
laundry lists of reasons why the massacres happen.
           Those reasons are present in the
film, but they aren’t pushed as theories, merely shown to be part of the mosaic
of the kids’ lives. The viewer is free to find one reason more compelling than
others, or to see no answers at all. In a way, Elephant doesn’t so much avoid answers as present the answer as
unknowable.
           But the film did add one more reason
to the list for me: The students seem to have a disconnect from the world
around them. Guns are ordered up with disconcerting ease over a laptop, and are
then used on real people in the same point-and-shoot fashion practiced in video
games.
           One student, the film’s “good guy,”
thinks his father might have fought in World War II, even though his father is
maybe 50. The student seems relatively unaffected by the massacre when it
comes. And it comes care of two students who are so removed from the world
outside their bedrooms they aren’t sure what Hitler looks like.
           Some artistic license intrudes. The
two murderous students dally a bit with homosexuality. Not only does this feel
like a tic from a gay director, it feels implausible. The movie is not about
Columbine, or any other specific situation, per se. Does Van Sant have a
responsibility to stay with the real-life components of the scenario, or is he
free to muse? At any rate, he has added to a long line of linking homosexuality
with murderous deviance, however ambiguously the connection is made.
           Elephant walks the line between implicit commentary and mere depiction well enough. But
what it finds is up to the viewer.
           Time is almost up to see Elephant, whichis only open for one week as part of the Little Theatre’s
Perpetual Film Festival. It will close Thursday, April 1.
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2004.
