(2003) dir. Gus Van Sant – w/ Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell, Jordan Taylor, Carrie Finklea, Nicole George, Brittany Mountain, etc.

Synopsis: In what is essentially a fictionalization of the Columbine school shootings (and school violence more generally), Gus Van Sant explores a day in the life of a school that about to be subjected to intense and unexpected violence from two of its students. Van Sant follows different characters as their paths cross and tangle over the course of the film, sometimes examining the same scene from several different perspectives at different points in the movie.

Review: ‘Elephant’ is good, but not outstanding. (It won the Palm d’Or at Cannes in 2003, so this point is obviously contestable.) It’s a quiet movie—there are only a couple moments, in fact, when the action is accompanied by any music at all. This, for me, was the first strike. I’m not generally a fan of quiet movies, in part because I get easily distracted. You may not. I do, and I find it hard to become engrossed. Another thing about Elephant is that it’s highly minimalist, and the script is largely improvised. Whether the former means anything, I have no idea. What the latter means is, strike #2. While the improvisational nature lends a certain credibility to what’s being said on-screen, it also detracts from the movie in some ways. I don’t care how brilliant the actors are, the dialogue, however genuine or stylistically desirable, isn’t going to be as tight as well-written scripted dialogue. These weaknesses aside, Elephant’s a pretty good movie. There are moments of genius, but the movie doesn’t manage to sustain these moments for very long. It’s well-shot, with inordinately long tracking shots that give the setting a real sense of depth and complexity. All things considered, it’s pretty well-acted, though I wouldn’t call any of the performances exceptional. The use of various perspectives to link the action and characters together is pretty clever, and helps to give you a sense that the movie is more than a single plotline. It also feeds into the sense that nothing (school violence, for starters) can be realistically said to have a single cause. Van Sant didn’t want to resolve the issue of where school violence comes from—after all, it’s not a point that can really be resolved, certainly not in 80+ minutes.

Rating: [•••½] out of [•••••]