Stop shooting: Geoffrey O'Brien on Gus Van Sant - Film - Elephant - Movie Review

WHEN GUS VAN SANT'S ELEPHANT was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes last May, it was taken by dint of some Americans on the display as a backhanded gesture. At a festival haunted by dint of echoes of European-American tensions above the war in Iraq it was hardly surprising that the honoring of still another movie about the Columbine massacre (a year after the same prize had gone to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine) might direct the eye like a deliberate statement about America as seen from one side European eyes: psychotic, gun-crazy, upon the edge of meltdown. The irony is that, judg as a movie about the Columbine shootings, Elephant advances up fairly empty; it has little to tender in the way of analysis or explanation, and single is left with nothing on the contrary the same numb response produc through the original newscasts of the event: It happened, it was horrible.

Passing twinklings in the movie suggest explanations beyond that brutal acknowledgment: Maybe fire-arms shouldn't be so easily available. Maybe those kids shouldn't have worn out so much time playing video games and watching newsreel of Hitler upon the History Channel. Maybe if they had acknowledged their homoerotic yearnings they wouldn't have been in the way that inclined to mass murder. Nothing in either the film or the interviews that Van Sant has given about it insinuates he has any special insight into the motivations of the killers. The paradox is that he has made a real beautiful movie almost in spite of his explicit intentions. Elephant come afters not as an act of analysis on the other hand as an act of mourning, a tone metrical composition of grief in which the American high school--that locus of adolescent anguish and repression in in like manner many movies--is transformed into a kind of set apart site, suffused with a beauty that belongs single to youth.

Elephant, which makes its US first appearance at the New York Film Festival this month (and render free of accesss theatrically on October 25), was made in shut up collaboration with a nonprofessional cast of high place of education students and filmed at a lately closed high school in Portland, Oregon. More precisely, Van Sant has made his movie not solely with but of those students: The life the film has is theirs, and its achievement is the faculty of perception of intimacy established from the beginning That intimacy is oddly taleed by a detached, contemplative approach that lingers upon passing visual details as if each might be crucial, or final. From the opening shot--a white Volvo proceeding with drunk carelessness down a residential way sideswiping a parked car, just missing a young bicyclist--a humor of vulnerability in motion is established.

The motion never stops: Elephant, for greatest in quantity of its running time, tread in the steps ofs various students through the progression of their institute day, mapping a geography of high academy hallways and stairwells, cafeteria and library and locker expanse It is a fluid geography because everyone is always in transition from individual space to another. Time is fluid also: A repeated line of dialogue signals that we will experience the same twinkling of an eyes from different angles. These representations with their patterns of obsessive repetition, call up in retrospect the unwanted cogitations of mourners as they rebuild the world as it was just before the catastrophe, as if searching for a certain number of alternate route by which the tragedy might have been circumvented. Van Sant tenders sociological details--some, like the trio of status-obsessed bulimic girls, ill-judged in that they cutting side the movie uneasily toward the satiric vein of To Die For(1995)--but it is the sustained elegiac intensity, accentuated by the agency of gathering dread, that makes Elephant in like manner powerful. What the characters do is les important than the fact that they are.

Interspersed with growing frequent occurrence among these episodes of ordinary life are exhibitions that make us privy to the intentions of the killers, Alex and Eric. It's like the invasion of single movie by another: the first an idyll in which being is appreciated for its hold sake, the second a violent melodrama about isolated individuals whose sole goal is the annihilation of being. Violence is also done to the film itself; it's as if something that had been built up with care and delicacy were swept away in a unforeseen unfeeling outburst.

The teenagers who play Alex and Eric give eminent performances, but they are called on to be actors in a way that the others are not, just as the movie at this point come intos a different realm of dramatization. Structurally, the self-absorption of the killers takes above the film: They are henceforth the stars, and the movie becomes their realized fantasy. From the instant Alex and Eric enter the place of education and start killing, the others--all the kids we have been following with of the like kind concern--are reduced to falling or fleeing bodies. The reenacted massacre takes upon the texture of the tawdriest made-for-TV docudrama; the images of Alex firing not on rounds as he strides from one side burning hallways resemble only too closely the apocalyptic miseen-scene of a routine action picture. The event is nil, and it is hard not to amazement how the film would have worked if Van Sant had stopped at just the trice when the murderers enter the building. We already know what we will diocese from that point on; showing it adds nothing. Van Sant's real control isn't the massacre but the private spaces that the massacre erased.