One of the great challenges in art is how to deal with tragic real-life events--especially recent ones, when the immediate emotional trauma still lingers, tender and easily agitated. Look no further for this artistic dilemma than in the way one after another attempt at confronting the Sept. 11th terrorist acts have veered off-track, at best well intentioned but inadequate, at worst simplistic and exploitative. The myriad paths to failure in these ventures are more than well-trodden. So, whatever one ends up thinking about Gus Van Sant's new film Elephant, there's no denying that it's brave--perhaps foolishly so--but brave, nonetheless.
Elephant doesn't tackle Sept. 11th, but it does confront an event that may loom just as large in the mind of any recent high school student: the Columbine massacre and the string of other school shootings in 1999 and 2000. Shot at an actual public high school and employing a cast of largely nonprofessional actors, Elephant attempts to recreate the day of a shooting by charting the course of ordinary, early morning happenings through to the shocking afternoon carnage wrought by two heavily-armed students. Though parallels to real-life shootings abound, direct references to any specific one are elided. The film's title--taken from Alan Clarke's graphic, identically-titled 1989 short on Northern Irish violence--presumably refers to that proverbial creature in the living room, so daunting a problem it's better ignored.
It's therefore fitting that for its first half or so Elephant basically does ignore the threat of school violence, merely content to capture a stunningly beautiful, impressively authentic portrait of contemporary high school life. At its heart, Elephant is experiential, observational--a mood piece. It's decidedly not some point-by-point illustration of a sociological case study, seeking to analyze the root causes of teenage violence. And so, every time it sticks to the former approach, it soars, and every time it indulges the latter impulse, it crumbles.
The movie's early scenes introduce us to a cross-section of the school's population and take us through their environment. There's John, a blond, rosy-cheeked kid in a yellow shirt, whose struggles with his alcoholic father make him late to school and prompt a visit to the principal's office. Elias spends his time taking and developing photographs, and the shy, gawky Carrie suffers through gym class. Then there's Jordan, the captain of the football team, and his girlfriend, who resemble models in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog spread. Pigeonholed into short descriptions, these characters come off as generic types, but, in the film, they transcend these first impressions through the actors' naturalistic performances and easy familiarity with the school atmosphere.
Passing through the library and cafeteria, the locker room and bathroom, we follow the students through hallways and stairwells, establishing a genuine topography of the modern high school. Van Sant builds off the similar technique he employed in his absurdist Gerry from earlier this year, filming the students in extended tracking shots and recording their journeys from place to place unabridged with a formally dazzling fluidity. Having the camera follow close behind the characters in shallow focus creates a curious mixture of objective and subjective observation. Our viewpoint constantly aligns with theirs but stays focused on their backs, rendering the surrounding world in a blurred haze. The effect is heightened further into a kind of unsettling claustrophobia by Van Sant's decision to constrict our field of view with a narrower screen shape--the 1.33 aspect ratio, confined decades ago to television.
But for all these inspired stylistic strategies, as soon as the two killers enter the film, things go awry. Before any on-screen violence, the film crudely ruptures its delicately crafted unease and naturalistic intimacy with the patent falsity of its characterization of the killers. Suddenly we're shunted into another film altogether, one that has no qualms about mindlessly proffering all the most tired influences as causes. Violent video games? Sure. Nazism, mental imbalance, bullying? Yes, yes, yes. Homosexuality? Just for good measure. I can't imagine the filmmakers wanted it to come across this way, but it does and it's pretty insufferable. Without any insight to offer, Elephant shouldn't even have tried, and it certainly shouldn't have gone ahead with the morally dubious idea of graphically depicting the massacre. While the film's first half toys with notions of the limits of representation--the essential unknowability, insufficiency, even irrelevancy of any actual depiction of the tragedy--its ending inexplicably decides to just barrel ahead.
As a sensitive, fully-realized depiction of an Average High School in Anywhere, USA, the film succeeds tremendously and, in retrospect, even quietly resonates with monumentality. How perverse, then, that the film's faults lay in the very aspect it has gained so much attention over: its treatment of school violence. As a direct reflection on Columbine, the film proves essentially worthless. That this makes Elephant ultimately wrongheaded and unsatisfying, however, shouldn't detract from all that it does provide us.