It's a quiet - and disquieting - day in the life of the American teenager.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published November 26, 2003
[Photo: Fine Line Features/HBO Films]
ELEPHANT: Alex Frost is barely a blip on the high school radar before he explodes into violence.
Grief counselors often use a poem titled The Elephant in the Room to coax discussion about issues people prefer to avoid. That allegorical elephant is huge and in the way, but it's constantly ignored, when serious discussion of the obstacle might make it disappear, or at least make it manageable.
Writer-director Gus Van Sant calls his latest film Elephant for the same reason. The issue is school violence, of which the Columbine massacre is the most infamous. Van Sant has no ready answers for why such events occur. You can sense in his abstract style distaste for armchair psychologists and TV talking heads who believe they do. Elephant is as open-ended and pointless (on the surface, at least) as two teenagers shooting up a high school. That is where its power lies.
There is no plot, just a depiction of an average day at a Portland, Ore., high school where students of various status and turmoil stroll through the rite of passage known as secondary education. Van Sant shows them doing nothing and everything in long tracking shots, often over their shoulders with the you-are-there effect of a video game. Scenes are replayed from slightly different perspectives that seldom make any differences. Everything seems dull, superficial or meaningless in the grand scheme of life.
But what if these students knew that such inconsequential things would be the last minutes of their lives? If they realized that people or sights they had just ignored might have saved them? Van Sant doesn't prescribe cures or sermonize, yet he's acutely aware that fate and inevitability also are crucial factors. What can we do to avoid fate? Nothing. Just hope we survive it.
Most of the young, unknown actors use their real names. We meet John (John McFarland), whose father (Timothy Bottoms) drunkenly drives him to school late, leading to another detention. Then there's Elias (Elias McConnell), a photography buff taking portraits and methodically developing them; surely this young man has a future. Nathan (Nathan Tyson) and Carrie (Carrie Finklea) make a cute couple vaguely discussing matters that may or may not have to do with sex. A trio of fashion chicks (Brittany Mountain, Jordan Taylor, Nicole George) gossip before lunch and purge themselves afterward. Michelle (Kristen Hicks) is the gawky library assistant too shy to shower after P.E. class and the first to hear the sound of a gun being cocked.
Finally we meet Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen), who barely register in the humdrum hallways except as spitball targets, if anything. Van Sant doesn't conclude that bullying makes them kill, no more than he blames the violent video game they play, the easy availability of firearms by mail or a Nazi Germany documentary they watch on television. Alex also plays classical piano. Should we blame Beethoven, too?
Of course not. But in our haste to assign blame for school violence, incredible connections have been made. By watching Van Sant's characters so clinically, one gets the feeling that any of those teenagers could pull a trigger, for reasons so personal to them that nobody would understand. Murder could be as arbitrary as the game of Eeeny Meeny Miney Moe concluding the film. Elephant would be a lesser film if it attempted to assign logic to such illogical violence. It's a tough nonlesson in being aware of a behemoth to which nobody wants to pay attention. Until it tramples us.
Elephant
Grade: A
Director: Gus Van Sant
Cast: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, Elias McConnell, John Robinson, Jordan Taylor, Carrie Finklea, Nathan Tyson, Nicole George, Matt Malloy, Timothy Bottoms
Screenplay: Gus Van Sant
Rating: R; violence, profanity, brief drug and sexual material
