Elephant

Gus van Sant is almost unique amongst directors. Somehow he manages to slip from decidedly left-field films (My Own Private Idaho, his frame-by-frame remake of Psycho) into big "Hollywood" films (Good Will Hunting) and back again without any problem. Along the way, he's also directed well acclaimed middle-ground films such as To Die For, shot music videos and become a published author.

Elephant does nothing to buck this trend of... well... bucking trends. Taking it's inspiration from the Columbine school shootings, the film portrays the day on which two teenage gunmen go on a shooting spree at their school. It's imaginatively shot, whilst retaining a distinctly low-budget feel (hand held cameras, lots of moving shots, lengthy periods of silence) and actually manages quite a sophisticated narrative.

The storyline follows several students on the day of the shooting as their lives take place, come together, and then diverge again. Not all of the moments of convergence are important - it may be just as simple as someone walking past a couple of friends taking a picture in the corridor, a tableau we get to see three times, from each of the people in its viewpoint.

Interspersed with this wandering narrative we see the days leading up to the shooting, as the people responsible for it prepare, planning which routes they'll take through the school, buying weapons and making notes as they walk around.

The irony is, of course, that watching a load of students attending a day at school actually makes rather dull viewing. What makes it interesting (and terrible) is only the fact that the cinemagoer and the gunmen know what is going to happen. The viewer, therefore, is left in a peculiar hybrid state of tedium and apprehension. The violence, when it does start, is initially all the more shocking for the period of tense calm which has preceded it. Having been immersed in the lives of the students for the previous hour or so, watching them being coldly gunned down is a bucket of cold water to the face.


However, for me personally, the brutal shock of the killings wore off quite quickly. That this was the case is probably a testament to the desensitising power of action films. We're used to being shown firearms dealing slow-motion, Matrix-esque deaths by the hundred and that's not the case here. In the second part, the film sticks firmly to the documentary-feel that it established in the first.

One problem critics have had with Elephant is that it makes no real effort to tackle the question of why the students felt the need to do what they did. This is definitely something I felt. We're given a bit of insight into their lives: the two are gay, bullied, they play computer games and they browse the internet. This smacks slightly of ticking the boxes that are popularly supposed by the media to be instrumental in this sort of event, we're only missing rap music or Marilyn Manson to complete the set. Perhaps realising this, at one point Van Sant shows us how one of the offenders is into classical music. After a day at school, he plays Fur Elise (whilst his co-conspirator shoots people in a computer game on his laptop).

So, van Sant's film is a curious beast. Undeniably powerful and shocking, it draws its power and horror from tedium - or rather, the sense of anticipation that this tedium allows to accumulate. Those looking for an element of moral judgement will come away empty-handed. The film refuses to comment on the acts itself, carrying on with the documentary feel, it lets the acts speak for themselves and leaves the viewer to make the judgement.

Which, to me, was where the film falls down a bit. The characters we've been shown aren't painted in sufficient detail for us to be able to make that judgement, meaning the film left me somewhat frustrated. It's refusal to point fingers and attribute blame, or even to give the viewer the information to make that decision was unsettling. However, this may well be Van Sant's point - that there are no easy answers to the central question of "Why?", and certainly none that can be gained from watching a two hour film.

The end result, then, is an open-ended, thought provoking film. It's not an easy watch, nor is it necessarily something that you'll want to go back to. Slow and inexorably horrifying, it's also dark, measured, grim and intelligent. All of which makes it definitely worth seeing, if not anything approaching enjoyable.