Elephant

ELEPHANT

Rating: F

Decidedly unhelpful.

"Don't go in there! Sir, trust me, for your own good, please don't go in there!" But the frantic pleas were to no avail - the people filed past me into the next showing anyway.

Elephant portrays the "fictional" story of two kids who go on a rampage one day and shoot up their high school with semi-automatic weapons and homemade pipe bombs. A blurb at the end declares any similarity to real persons or events is purely coincidental. Mmm-hmmm. Having just re-watched Bowling for Columbine, and knowing nothing about the background behind the massacre, I went in hoping for a little insight into the causes and circumstances behind the tragedy. Some 80 minutes later, I emerged no more wiser on the subject than I was going in. Perhaps the real question to be asked is how someone could take such fertile subject matter and screw it up so thoroughly.

The entire production appears to have been budgeted for about the price of a used Subaru. While this doesn't automatically make a film bad, there's no insightful storyline or innovative directing to compensate for the low production values. Quite the reverse. Basically, it looks like Gus Van Sant and company rented a real high school, stocked it with amateur actors, then filmed the result as they wandered about and ad-libbed their lines. Aim a video camera at your aquarium and you'll get the same effect. I won't bother listing any of the actors' names - it's not like you'll be seeing them anywhere again. About 80 percent of the film is spent following one student or another through the halls of the school, as they perform some banal task or engage in a snippet of meaningless conversation. Sometimes, events are repeated from different students' points of view, to drive home the concept of their intersecting lives. What's completely lacking is any kind of dramatic tension. Even when the boys march into the school loaded for bear and the shootings are about to commence, there's zero sense of excitement. The scene where one student tries to warn others not to enter the building could've been a masterpiece of horrific frenzy. Instead it somehow manages to be as dull as yesterday's meatloaf. In fact, watching this movie is actually less interesting than going to school in real life, which is some kind of dubious milestone.

In an attempt to cast this film in its best light, I suppose one could argue that the tedium of the students' daily lives is meant to be shown as a factor in the massacre. That is, kids deprived of strong role models (one parent is a drunk; another is deemed so unimportant her face isn't shown) and whose lives lack meaning, are prone to committing unthinkable outbursts of violence because they have no moral compass. Assuming I'm not putting words in Van Sant's mouth, such an approach still makes for a very tedious movie. What's more, Van Sant never delves into the personalities of any of his subjects, which is perhaps his worst sin. Even students in a boring high school each still have their unique perspective on the world; we never learn anything meaningful about any of them, so when the time comes for the gunplay the victims might as well be cardboard targets with bulls-eyes drawn on them.

So why did they name this film "Elephant"? My guess is "High School Homicide" simply wasn't pretentious enough. Or maybe they just couldn't spell "Hippopotamus." If you really must know, the answer is explained here. Which proves even Van Sant didn't know what the title meant.