Elephant | Review

Van Sant is in official comeback mode with ode to suburban school life and other unsettling thoughts.

If the opening screening at this year’s Montreal World Film Festival is any indication of audiences reception of the film come opening weekend in the states, this Grand Prize winner at Cannes will create quite the commotion with a film forecast that will be nothing like the favorably safe bet of Finding Forrester but more like Gus Van Sant’s earlier and edgier pieces. Michael Moore’s charged doc left an imprint at the same festival exactly one year before and now we have Elephant a fictionalized, yet very real experimental film about the lead-up events that could have transpired on the day that changed America.

With the same coordinated framing, moving camera and visual style found in his last effort Gerry, the piece literally hovers over the high-school life floating and focusing on the bits of conversation that show the exaggerated intensity of living inside young eager minds and then replaces fall foliage and students pacing along in long hallways by a breathtakingly harsh shot to the stomach which is rather unsettling to watch or imagine. A cast of adolescent non-actors make-up the faces of this film with a familiar Kids type of intimacy between the subjects and the camera. Rather than describe and give each character a real background, Van Sant labels each one by name and by identifying them with a personal style ranging from the jock, the nerd, the popular girl, the creative kid and the one that got picked on. Set-up within this continuous Slackers set-up of exchanges, the point-of-view cinematography is paralyzing beautiful, the dream-like quality of the picture and snip-it of teenage conversation substitute for the absent narrative but perhaps a little more dialogue would have made this high-school journey more favorable towards the pacing of the picture which in more than one connecting sequence was perhaps a tad-bit slow.

Apparently, there is a new trend is feature films that make gays in cold-blooded killers as seen with Party Monster, perhaps the shower kiss was an homage to the lifestyle in My Own Private Idaho. Despite this odd insertion, the film’s most stunning moment is the violent sequence which brought me to think about the disturbing moment in Bowling for Columbine where Moore provides a split screen of the four security camera footage during the school massacre. You’ll marvel at its beauty found inside some insanely long tracking shots feed by natural outdoor lighting, but the absence of an auteur voice makes for an empty text where some scenes are repeated from a different perspective for no reason at all. I think that this will infuriate a lot of traditional movie-goers, where as the art-house crowd will gleefully interpret this and his last effort as a return to avant-garde form. Congrats to HBO films for having the courage to pick this up, where the film fails is in making a point about not making a point, and where Elephant succeeds is in showing the acts and leaving us with a couple of questions of our own.

Rating 3 stars