This past May, the Cannes jury broke a hallowed film festival ground rule only one award per film, please by awarding both the Palme D’Or and the Best Director prize to the same film. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant may be the apotheosis of the director’s obsession with examining misspent youth (particularly the misspent youth of photogenic young men), but it’s hardly worth breaking 50 years of tradition for.
The film painstakingly aims for a sort of Antonioni-like objectivism in its portrait of an ordinary American high school in the hours before two heavily armed students massacre their teachers and classmates. Van Sant, in the same ‘Look ma, I can use mise-en-scene!’ style he employed in February’s Gerry, uses long takes, slow tracking shots and spare music and dialogue. The narrative follows a group of students seemingly chosen at random, who go about their business unaware of the mayhem that awaits them at the end of the day.
Eli (Elias McConnell) snaps photos of his classmates. Michelle (Kristen Hicks), graceless and unathletic, suffers through a gym class. John (John Robinson) tries to find someone to pick up his drunken father (Timothy Bottoms). Jordan (Jordan Taylor), Brittany (Brittany Mountain) and Nicole (Nicole George) gossip and talk about shopping. Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Duelen) cut school, assemble their artillery and engage in target practice, methodically preparing for their deadly mission.
In interviews, Van Sant has emphasized his intention not to judge or explain the actions of kids who commit school violence. The long, slow tracking shots of students silently walking down school hallways (which must account for about 30 percent of the entire film) are apparently supposed to distance the viewer from conventional ideas of heroes and villains, plotlines and payoffs, so that the violence never seems either rationalized or anticipated.
But beneath the museum-piece stylistics, Elephant reeks of judgment. Subtly but concretely, the film trots out all the old scapegoats from the Columbine days. Alex and Eric are shown … playing violent video games! Purchasing weapons over the internet! Showering together! What, they didn’t have time to rent The Matrix and listen to Marilyn Manson?
The film’s treatment of even the non-murderous characters borders on cruelty. After their lunchtime bitch session, Jordan, Brittany and Nicole who, as a teen-girl trio, are almost as convincing as Jessie, Lisa and Kelly from ‘Saved by the Bell’ nonchalantly sashay into the ladies’ room and vomit up their lunches. This scene isn’t a resonant evocation of modern teenage life. It’s a mean-spirited joke, and a bad one.
Similarly, pay attention to the last shot that features Eli. His final scene is all setup and no payoff, and reveals that Van Sant cares about him not as a character, but as a walking metaphor for his generation’s desensitization to violence. You’ll be forgiven for leaving the theater not knowing if the character has lived or died.
Van Sant cast non-professional actors in all of the key roles, which would seem like a good idea if unforced naturalism is the objective. Too bad these non-actors have apparently been cast solely on the basis of their resemblance to Calvin Klein models circa the mid-’90s kiddie-porn campaign, and not one of them is capable of even walking down a hallway convincingly.
With Gerry, Van Sant employed long, static takes to occasionally mesmerizing effect. His unmoving shots focused on tiny, hypnotic dramas. With Elephant, Van Sant has again teamed up with cinematographer Harris Savides, but the results of their mise-en-scene obsession are surprisingly less trenchant. A minute-long shot of dark clouds forming over the school? Is that the best visual metaphor we can come up with?
When Alex and Eric eventually open fire, Elephant attains fleeting moments of power, simply by virtue of the events it depicts. But even if the psychology behind youth violence can never be fully explained, why not at least try to create a world in which it has a specific impact on well-defined individuals, rather than hazy archetypes? After Michael Moore shamelessly used the actual Columbine security footage for maximum tearjerking effect in Bowling for Columbine, it’s difficult to find anything that happens in Elephant terribly profound or disturbing.
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