Elephant
There are many things in the brave new Gus Van Sant movie, ''Elephant,'' that I won't soon forget: the way Beethoven is used to cast an ominous pall over the film's Portland high school setting; how the eloquence of Harris Savides's cinematography stands in almost brutal contrast to the awkward teenagers who wander in front of or away from the camera; the surreal, terrifying massacre to which the picture builds.
But what first struck me like a flash of lightning was the shot of the girl, the plain, homely one in the sweatshirt (we learn later that her name is Michelle), who drifts into the frame and looks up at a sky we can't see as though she knows, eventually, it's going to fall. And she's right. It does. Heaven crashes right though earth, straight to hell.
Van Sant, with the invaluable Savides, earns our trust. The world they present is awfully, awfully familiar. The halls could be the halls you walked. The busy principal's office becomes the one you avoided. The kids -- overwhelmingly white -- are the ones you either were or saw on TV or in the movies. The camera stalks its archetypes (the jock, the popular girl, the goth, the misfit) over and over, around and around, to the point at which you're dizzy but hypnotized. Eventually, it becomes clear that Van Sant has used these visual rhythms to foster both our comfort and our dread -- making us feel like any kid in any high school, only to shatter that recognition and shatter us.
''Elephant'' isn't so much about why people kill, but what we do when others do, where we look, what we say to explain it. The movie is an 86-minute cosmic provocation to rethink how we talk about the unspeakable, the scapegoats we look for, the effigies we burn. The movie has the Columbine killings (among the rash of school shootings that pocked the end of 1999) on its mind as it responds to the outrage people had about them: blaming art, popular youth culture, and the purported decline of moral standards.
Van Sant, who is a great champion of the American teenager, offers ''Elephant'' as a reconsideration. The atmosphere is hypo-stylized, vividly generic and worse than real, like a doomy Frederick Wiseman documentary.
What story there is in ''Elephant'' is told in wisps that blow elliptically back and forth in time, deepening as scenes and encounters are repeated over the space of about 48 hours. The cast consists of nonactor high school kids from the Pacific Northwest, and their naturalism furnishes the picture with its understatement. We meet a blond named John (John Robinson) whose father (Timothy Bottoms) is once again drunk, sitting in the car outside the school. There's also Elias (Elias McConnell), who snaps pictures until the bitter end, when he becomes a sort of war photographer; Nathan (Nathan Tyson), whose hooded sweatshirt goes well with his varsity carriage; Acadia (Alicia Miles), a raven-haired creature who kisses John like a dark angel; poor Michelle (Kristen Hicks); a coven of bulimic girls; and two boys named Alex and Eric (Alex Frost and Eric Deulen), who will ultimately trudge down the halls and lay waste to the student body.
The lingering question is why. Also up for consideration is what Van Sant intends in his refusal (or is it his inability?) to tell us. We spend time with Alex and Eric as they sit around Alex's bedroom, which we're tempted to canvass for the Marilyn Manson posters or the drug paraphernalia. They're not there. These boys are clean. Still, Van Sant tempts us to assign a motive to their crime. Is it the target-practice videogame Eric plays? Is it the instructive Nazi documentary that the boys passively watch? Is it the kids who bully Alex? Or is it his parents, whose heads never make into the camera frame? Could it be the kiss the boys share in the shower on the morning of their spree, or the Beethoven Alex practices on his piano? It's all inconclusive and ultimately irrelevant. With a daring that some will call irresponsible, Van Sant challenges us to lay blame for an act that at its core is absolutely senseless. Nazi, queer, gameboy: It doesn't matter what a killer is, only that he has killed.
Video
