Star Rating: **
Gus Van Sant’s "Elephant" is much like the film’s own background shots—blurry, unfocused and confusing. This film has nothing nice to say and takes far too long to say it. At the end of the movie, I asked myself what really happened here. I came up with one answer: nothing I wanted to see.
The lack of anything happening in the first half of the film strongly implies that something will happen in the second. But when it does, you wish the movie would go back to being boring and safe. You can’t have nightmares from something that’s boring and safe.
The story is loosely based on the notorious 1999 Columbine High School Massacre. Fine. If the goal of this movie is to be completely horrible and rig us with bullet after bullet of how shitty life really is, it accomplishes this within moments.
"Elephant" is told in a nonlinear order, using various techniques including faded backgrounds and scenes shot from different angels to imply that we’re seeing the same scene but from someone else’s perspective. The big picture of the movie is that two teenaged boys go on a massive shooting spree at a fictional high school in Portland, Oregon. The problem here is that the actual shootings take place in the last twenty minutes of the movie. The first hour is just scene after scene after scene of high school kid scenarios that just takes us off the track of what this movie is really about because we think the story will be about these kids and their problems.
We have a). the boy who has trouble connecting with his father. B). The chatty school girly girl group. C). The couple of cutesy lovers. D). A dude who walks around and takes pictures of stuff. E). a girl who gets picked on for wearing the wrong clothes to gym and has a job she probably hates. If I’m boring you with seemingly superfluous character descriptions then I’m effectively describing the structure of this film.
This movie really emphasizes that the shooting takes place on a normal school day. It accomplishes this very effectively, by showing us all of those everyday school scenes. It made the outcome even more tragic. I liked the characters and their situations. Those girls made me laugh a little. I was intrigued by that artsy photographer. My heart went out to the girl who was getting picked on for wearing the wrong clothes to gym. All these characters we meet that we begin to form attachments to really have no purpose accept to get killed at the end. And the depressing, mind eating, sob provoking ending is the best part. And when I say best I mean—
I’m not denying Gus Van Sant’s talent, he can tell a good story. But this project was so nasty to start with and all he really accomplishes is making it look worse. I have to wonder, was that really his plan? How can you take a subject as gruesome as kids murdering each other and adults too, and make it entertaining? It doesn’t work here at all. It’s almost shameless what Van Sant puts on screen here.
The film does delve into the lives of the killers themselves. At first, it’s rather interesting. They’re two boys who get teased a lot. Before they go around shooting everyone, they are making out in the shower. Then in the last five minutes of the film, one guns the other down. This kills the idea of a classical romance between the killers, ala "Bonnie & Clyde", and instead makes… no sense, poetic or otherwise.
"Elephant" won the Palme d’Or (Prize for Best Picture) at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003. The nice thing about the Cannes Film Festival is that it focuses on the smaller, less well known indie films from around the world. Cannes gives films like these a chance to shine and maybe become classics. After all, some of the best films of all time started out small. Some of the great classics of today, i.e. "Taxi Driver", "Apocalypse Now" and "Pulp Fiction" were all Palme d’Or winners. However, every so often there is a serious miscarriage of justice. The fact that two teenaged guys get away with a massive killing spree and that someone won a prize for showing it on screen would be some of them.
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