November 20-26, 2003

movies

Forced Perspective

Still voices, distant lives: Eric (Eric Deulen) spends a moment alone.

Elephant doesn't explain Columbine; it asks if anyone could.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

A title ought to add something to a movie, although nowadays it’s more likely to point to a target market: The titles of The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions don’t really say anything, except "Here we go again." The title of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant is arguably too cryptic, in that there’s no way to link it to the film without outside explanation. But once you’ve heard Van Sant’s explanation -- or, rather, explanations -- for the title, it’s impossible to think of anything more apt.

For the story of a suburban high school on the verge of a Columbine-type massacre, Van Sant took inspiration, and his title, from Alan Clarke's 1989 short film, an impressionistic take on violence in Northern Ireland. But in so doing, he misunderstood Clarke's intent. Clarke meant to suggest that the sudden increase in sectarian violence was the elephant in the living room, the thing everyone knew but no one wanted to discuss. But Van Sant thought of the old story of the blind men and the elephant, where each grabs hold of a different part and takes it for a different object, none of them able to admit their inability to see the whole. But Van Sant's misunderstanding turned out to be a perfect accident. Where neither interpretation would have sufficed for this dazzlingly complex film, the space between them encompasses it neatly. On the one hand, it's a plea for understanding; on the other, a reminder of how impossible it is to know another's heart.

Elephant begins with an image of clouds moving through the sky, then cuts to an overhead shot of a car swerving down a tract home-lined street. Either shot might suggest a divine perspective, but it's the view of a god who only watches and shakes his head. The people are left to fend for themselves -- and since this is a Gus Van Sant movie, those people are mostly kids. Van Sant has taken some deserved criticism for his seeming inability to embrace an adult perspective, and the few adults in Elephant are impotent, distant figures, like the drunken father (Timothy Bottoms) driving that swerving automobile. It's up to John (John Robinson) to take the wheel and drive himself to school, then leave the keys in the front office for his brother. "Dad's drunk again," he drawls into the pay phone, right before the principal comes up and chews him out, no questions asked.

Shot in the boxy 1:33 aspect ratio common to TV, Elephant's images don't spread out: They loom. Rejecting widescreen omniscience, each circumscribed frame reveals its own limitations; what's onscreen inevitably conjures what isn't. As Harris Savides' ghostly camera shadows first John, then a handful of other students, through the high school's halls, it sometimes turns to take in their wake; after hunky Jordan (Jordan Taylor) blows by a pack of gossiping girls, the camera swivels and slips into slow motion, long enough to see one of them ecstatically mouth the words, "Soo cute." But Jordan doesn't notice. He keeps moving, and so do we.

Like the blind men groping that pachyderm, Elephant replays scenes from multiple perspectives, but unlike a standard puzzle-box thriller, there's no illusion that we're closing in on the truth each time we revisit the same scene. Like a detective sifting through eyewitness testimony, we find that each repetition broadens our understanding, but doesn't necessarily deepen it. Even those who aren't alerted to the movie's subject matter in advance will know what's going to happen within the first 20 minutes -- when John brushes two camo-clad students with heavy shoulder bags, the sickening certainty starts eating at your gut. You know what's going to happen, but you don't know why.

Obsessively revisiting the same few minutes, connecting up moments and retracing people's paths, Elephant is a cross between a forensic investigation and an existential inquiry. In one sense, it mirrors the insistent quest for answers in the wake of any public disaster; in another, it rejects that search as ultimately fruitless. Elephant has been dogged since Cannes with the ludicrous criticism that it fails to provide an explanation for Columbine, as if an 80-minute movie could do what four years of investigation have not. The movie departs from its in-the-moment structure to flash back to Eric (Eric Deulen) and Alex (Alex Frost) before they become killers; we see them watching documentaries on Hitler, playing violent video games, shopping for guns on the Internet. But we also see Eric playing halting but beautiful piano, and being pelted with spitballs in the back of a classroom in a scene that recalls the ritual degradation of Todd Haynes' Poison. As he walks through the cafeteria later scribbling notes on a pad, one student asks Eric what he's doing. Working on his plan, he says. What plan? she asks. "You'll see." There's no ominous musical sting, no shock wave of foreboding. Even knowing what's to come, you can't make the moment as horrible as it should be. And if you can't see it in hindsight, who could have seen it then?

As in Van Sant's elephant story, Elephant's characters don't see, because they can't, or they won't. When the camera focuses on painfully shy Michelle (Kristen Hicks), Savides uses lenses so long that everything else is a blur. After a gym teacher admonishes her for not wearing shorts, Michelle takes the long way to the locker room through an abandoned gym, then wriggles out of her clothes under her sweatshirt. For all its eventual violence, there's nothing in Elephant as painful as the unblinking shot of Michelle in the locker room, staring straight ahead while the voices of offscreen girls erupt into laughter. (The "loser" that punctuates the scene is a redundant misstep.)

Elephant's empathy isn't boundless. Though it shows plenty of understanding toward the killers, Van Sant's geek-revenge caricature of three Heathers-esque teen queens is an artistic failure as well as a moral one; their lockstep post-lunch purge is ham-fisted, dismissive satire, and Van Sant makes sure to throw in an extra moment of bitchiness right before a gun-toting Eric bursts through the bathroom door, the only time the movie uses death as a punch line to a bad joke. At one point, the camera actually seems to lose interest in them, wandering across the lunchroom before rejoining them en route. It's the only time the movie is truly shortsighted.

In Elephant's most calmly devastating twist, a chance meeting between two characters is replayed from each of their perspectives, and then from a third, which belongs to a character who, like them, you'd never noticed. The moment, in itself, is nothing, an offhand exchange built with the vernacular accuracy ("My parents are being bitches this week") that characterizes Elephant's freeform script. But it reminds you how close people can be and still be invisible, and how crushing that invisibility can be. When Eric storms the library and starts shooting, the camera takes on his point of view, and the focus is so shallow you literally can't see past the barrel of his gun. (It takes a second viewing to figure out who's been shot.) His violence is like an attempt to break into that blurry void, and it fails. As the camera watches him walk down the hall toward his last victims, the focus blurs so far he's reduced to a shimmering squiggle, like a heat mirage in the desert. In a minute, he won't exist at all.

Elephant

Written and directed by Gus Van Sant A Fine Line release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

recommended

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there