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Elephant
(Feature Film 2003)
Verdict: Complacent, silently-executed violence
Elephant is based loosely on the Columbine school-boy massacre - but it’s violence in an easy-to-view, un-dramatic, way. A normally-edgy spectator of atrocities can watch it without flinching and looking away to the cinema’s toilet signs.
A dad’s a bit drunk. So his son drives to school with dad as passenger. The genre looks like minimal American-speak, with dad not very convincing as a drunk. But that’s to interpret the content as drama, whereas Elephant’s style is reality. Whirry camera shots of teenagers walking through their polished and spacious American school without dialogue or interaction focuses attention on tiny details. The back of a teenager's neck - and the rub of his jeans as he glides along – is exchanged for another boy walking across a football pitch and into the school. The cues here aren’t faces, but the back of teenagers’ heads.
Far-away school-yard sounds and laughter build a little suspense as the camera endlessly follows a boy who must surely be the killer. He meets his girlfriend, they pass a group chatting insignificantly. Voices are heard as if through water. Students chat in a classroom, girls leave a canteen to vomit bulimically in the lavatory, a boy is sprayed with paper pellets. The scenes replay from various angles – building layers to the story in a way that’s relaxed, refreshingly spacious.
The film’s method compels an intensity of concentration. When the action follows the paper-pellets student home, playing piano in his room, there’s an inescapable suggestion that he is to be the one. It’s done by small touches – his minor reaction to making mistakes with his playing – deftly revealing the depth of his frustration. He’s joined by another teenage boy; they chat in a let’s-order-a-pizza kind of way, planning the afternoon shoot-out at their school. Guns they’ve ordered over the internet are delivered to the house. The boys kiss in a shower – there’s a feeling that the pace of the film might change.
The boys murder the pupils at school complacently. There’s no feeling of sweating palms. Screaming on (and off) screen is kept to a minimum. One of the boys shoots the head teacher. He’s gunned down himself. The end of the film leaves the other boy holding a couple at gun-point in the school’s meat-safe.
Elephant provokes neither an emotional up nor down. Instead, it’s disturbing and affecting. The resounding echo of teenage complacency and silently-executed violence provokes a feeling uncomfortably like witnessing the real thing.
END
Cecilia Holmes
reviewed 2 March 04 / Curzon Cinema Soho
(c) Cecilia Holmes 2004
FRINGE REPORT
www.fringereport.com
Elephant
(Feature Film 2003)
Verdict: Hypnotic school slaughter
Two schoolboys buy weapons on the internet and shoot their fellow pupils. Elephant is directed and edited by Gus Van Sant, and produced by Diane Keaton. It's feature-length, and filmed without sensationalism in relaxed documentary style. There is no dramatic plot, no police intervention or rescue, and no moral judgment.
Most of the film follows selected pupils - introduced by titles - arriving at school and following their daily routines. Two who emerge as the killers are introduced, and followed as they make plans & assemble ammunition. In the last minutes of the film, the camera tracks their walk round the school as they locate and shoot pupils, some of whom have tried to hide.
We're introduced to pretty blond-haired John McFarland (John Robinson), solicitous for his drunken dad (Timothy Bottoms); relaxed gay photographer Elias (Elias McConnell), and to special-needs pupil Michelle (Kristen Hicks). Jordan (Jordan Taylor), Nicole (Nicole George) and Brittany (Brittany Mountain) chatter in the canteen, then throw up bulimically in the lavatory. We hear desultory conversations, lovers' talk, and eavesdrop on class discussions; the sky turns from cerulean blue to storm.
Alex (Alex Frost) gets pelted with chewed-up paper pulp in science class, drinks milk at home, plays Fur Elise and Moonlight Sonata, kisses Eric (Eric Deulen) in the shower, and off they go to kill.
Lindsay Anderson explored school-based slaughter in his 1968 masterpiece If. Real-life school shootings include those in the UK at Dunblane (13 March 1996); in America at Cleveland Elementary School, San Carlos when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on the school with a .22 rifle on Monday, January 29, 1979 (remarking, famously, 'I don't like Mondays'); and at the Columbine High School massacre on 20 April 1999 in Littleton, Colorado, when two pupils, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 10 pupils and one teacher. The film is loosely based on Columbine.
The title refers to a 1989 film about violence in Northern Ireland by Alan Clarke 'a problem that is as easy to ignore as an elephant in the living room.' A detailed explanation is given on the company's website.
Gus Van Sant's direction and editing creates a story with hynotic allure, the more so for its leisurely pace and unemotional eye. Shot, unusually, in Academy ratio (the old-fashioned screen size) - like a classic European art-house film - it uses a sound-track fashioned to appear real (including some camera whir), with occasional added sounds to provoke tension.
Pointless slaughter of innocent people by Americans is familiar to many around the world. In Elephant, the victims are American too. Likely to be popular in Vietnam, occupied Palestine, and Iraq.
