January 4, 2010: Elephant
Elephant (2003) is a simple conceptual movie by Gus Van Sant, who remains among the few modern American directors who could still be described as an auteur and who regularly shuns convention in his filmmaking. From his early cult hit Drugstore Cowboy, he moved along to a mid-1990s blast of more commercial fare written by others, such as the Nicole Kidman vehicle To Die For (1995), the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting (1997), the critically panned but fascinating remake of Psycho (1998), and the mediocre Finding Forrester (2000). All of these I have seen, but recently I gather he has returned to the smaller scale films of his roots, with Gerry (2002), Elephant, Last Days (2005) and Paranoid Park (2007). I hadn’t seen any of these until now.
Elephant is a short and direct film about a high school shooting, modeled on the Columbine shootings of a few years earlier. We see a number of vignettes of various students throughout the school, illustrating many of the common relationships among the jocks, nerds, and artists, but also showing some of those less sterotypical relaionships which develop organically among kids based on shared interests and not just cliques. This lends a sense of realism to the film’s setup, and indicates an understanding of how people interact. These intersecting scenes all end up converging around the same point in time, after which we move to a more linear continuation of the story as the young gunmen go on their rampage.
Elephant is disorienting at the start, and I was trying to keep the characters straight in my head, remembering names and relationships as more and more of them were introduced, and it was a while before it was made clear that these were all parallel timelines. It might seem less chaotic upon a second viewing. Either way, the point was probably to emphasize the individuality of all of these people, and the complexities of their lives and what they are dealing with, to heighten the shock when so many of those lives are instantly snuffed out. I can’t say that I understand the point this movie is trying to make, and I certainly don’t understand the ending so I won’t even speculate, but it’s a whirlwind experience and one which I felt was worthwhile. This is one of those reviews which really lives up to its Half-Assed moniker. I haven’t even tried to pick apart what the title means.
Bare-bones narrative really packs a wallop.
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