Okay, “Elephant” is a film inspired by the Columbine shootings, and shows a regular high school day ending in a similar harrowing incident. The film is shot beautifully, with some huge (and technically amazing) tracking shots, that follow several different students on their individual journeys throughout the school. They serve to build up a picture of a vibrant high school full of life, and really put you in to the shoes of some of the characters.
The direction is generally great – the impressive tracking shots, the use of Benny in playing with our Hollywood action star expectations, playing with the diegetic volume, the use of character perspectives and how they cross and recross paths to build up an image of a real school. However Van Sant’s direction does occasionally dip, certain tracking shots do drag (together, taking up a decent percentage of the film’s run time) and the use of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata when following Nathan, which does nothing to serve the scene, just comes off as pretentious.
The film is good at what it does – it paints out a reasonably believable school, with classic school archetypes that everyone can recognise and relate to, which then makes the final brutal shoot out all the more harrowing. But you know what? We already KNOW these incidents are harrowing, the original Columbine CCTV footage and distressing police phone calls broadcast on the news were just as harrowing. Making a film to show this just seems like shooting fish in a barrel, although admittedly Gus Van Sant shot fish in a barrel beautifully with this film.
I think this film marks the first time I’ve strongly disagreed with one of my favourite film critics, Roger Ebert – he praised the film extremely highly. Personally I couldn’t help thinking that the film would have benefited from actually confronting some of the issues raised by these shooting. Why not try and delve in to the psyche of the killers? How students can become so alienated and angry with the world that they can be driven to do such terrible things. Gus Van Sant said in his defence : “Who knows why those boys acted as they did?” – and it’s true, nobody can really know, but that doesn’t absolve us from the responsibility to try. Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures” would be a great example, based on murders committed by two alienated girls in New Zealand – a real life case, and Jackson and Fran Walsh gave a valiant effort to try and tell their story. Was the story accurate? We can never know, but is it believable? Yes, and that is what is more important. Gus Van Sant did not do anything to explain the motivations of the characters, and fair enough – but he could have at least tried to make them believable. Instead the shooters are clichéd and stereotypical, alienated and angsty teenagers – the scene where Alex is playing Beethoven on the piano while Eric plays a violent computer game is so heavy-handed it is almost nauseating. By attempting to defy a need for motivation Van Sant just pimps out the same old tired stereotypes that we’ve seen a million times before.
At first I thought the film was going to be some kind of “whodunnit” or “whosgunnadoit” – showing us all these different characters and leaving us guessing who the killers would be. Wouldn’t this have been a little better than revealing the (sadly clichéd) identity of the killers so early on? Because the scary thing about these killers is not who they are, but who they could be.
