Elephant (2003)
When writer-director Gus Van Sant initially set out to produce the psychological drama, Elephant, its title a reference to director Alan Clarke's 1989 BBC short film of the same name, it began its journey as a documentary about the Columbine High School massacre, one of the most infamous massacres ever committed in the United States that remains the deadliest mass shooting in Colorado. On April 20, 1999, two 12th-grade students named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold arrived at their high school in Columbine, Colorado and murdered 13 of their fellow students and one teacher in a shooting and attempted bombing, concluding once both gunmen took their own lives before they could face criminal punishment. Their gunshots injured 20 more people, and three others were injured while trying to escape.
For whatever reason, Van Sant elected to abandon his idea of a factual account in favor of a largely fictionalized cinematic dramatization. The core concept of his movie would remain faithful to its real-life source inspiration: a high school shooting perpetrated by a pair of mentally disturbed teenage boys. However, the names of the antagonists have been changed, along with those of the fictional victims and survivors in their path. In an effort to keep his budget as low as possible, Van Sant filmed Elephant in his hometown of Portland, Oregon in late 2002 on the former campus of Whitaker Middle School. In a day and age where school shootings have become more prevalent in our society, owing largely to a deficit in mental healthcare, it's crucial for any filmmaker seeking to channel this subject into their art to present it in a way that's hard-hitting and true to life without veering into sickening exploitation. In other words, school shootings shouldn't be exploited as a mere hook for a blood-and-guts splatter film, in which the primary focus is on the perpetrators and the blood they shed in their wake, as opposed to the suffering of their victims.
To his credit, Van Sant's stab at tackling this increasingly commonplace societal issue could never be accused of tastelessness or exploitation. Without wavering far from his original intention, he approaches the real-life tragedy of Columbine with a documentarian eye and admirable commitment to authenticity, eschewing any trace of sensationalism. He doesn't glorify the violence that his two fictitious gunmen are gearing up to carry out, presenting his story as a slice-of-life snapshot that's almost immediately hamstrung by stilted performances, poorly improvised dialogue, a pretentious and quickly repetitive shooting style, and self-indulgent pacing.
Elephant doesn't have much of a conventional plotline to speak of, documenting a limited gallery of ordinary teenagers as they undergo their final two nondescript days at Watt High School in Portland, Oregon. For some, these two days will become their last on Earth. For others, they will walk away with their lives intact, but psychologically, they will remain scarred and permanently altered. Blending the fictional storytelling of cinema with the cinema-verite style of a documentary, Van Sant contrasts the mundanity of a run-of-the-mill day of high school with the life-altering tragedy that awaits his unsuspecting characters. He presents the story as a day in the lives of 10 students: a trio of best friends argues during lunch, a popular couple discusses plans for an upcoming drinking party, members of a Gay-Straight Alliance club gather around and frivolously debate whether you can detect homosexuality by appearance, the son of an alcoholic father waits for the arrival of his brother so he may pick up their dad from school.
In terms of approach, Elephant shares a similar narrative trajectory to another high-school revenge movie, Brian De Palma's Carrie, in which the majority of the plot functions as a suspenseful buildup to the climactic prom-night set piece where Carrie White unleashes her pent-up telekinetic fury on a gymnasium of sadistic classmates. Likewise, every meandering tracking shot and forgettable interaction in Elephant is nothing more than a prelude to a Columbine-structured shooting, intended to lull us into a false sense of security and tedium before bombarding us in a hail of bullets.
In an effort to contend with the unanswerable question of why Harris and Klebold shot up their high school on a random Tuesday morning, Van Sant refrains from ascribing a clear-cut motivation for his antagonists' actions. No concrete explanation is given for their massacre. Only a smattering of hints are laid out: Alex (Alex Frost), the lead gunman, is pummeled with spit balls by two students in science class; in the cafeteria, he pauses and grips his head, insinuating an undiagnosed mental illness; at home, he and his best friend slash co-conspirator, Eric (Eric Deulen), watch a documentary about Hitler on TV, possibly accounting for their feelings of superiority and hunger for infamy and dominance; lying in Alex's bed, Eric plays a game on his laptop in which he indiscriminately guns down a horde of mobile stick figures from behind, illustrating his desensitization to mowing people down and seeing them merely as featureless, artificial figures whose lives don't matter.
Van Sant forces his characters to behave in certain ways that contradict the unvarnished, true-to-life realism for which he's desperately striving, riddling his script with almost as many plot holes as bullets. When a delivery man bearing a package of a rifle, shotgun, and several pistols arrives at Alex's doorstep, he nonchalantly hands it over to Alex despite the fact that he's a minor who should be in school and accepts his signature without even asking for his parents' permission. Perhaps this is intended as a commentary on the gun industry's fixation with profit over safety, but it comes across more like sloppily convenient screenwriting. When Acadia (Alicia Miles), a member of the Gay-Straight Alliance, comes across John, a stranger to her, crying by himself, she consoles him with a kiss on the cheek. While this is intended to display her compassionate personality, the gesture registers as more ridiculous and artificial than heartfelt. It's a total "Director Says" moment, and there are at least two more. As Alex jots down details for his shooting in a notepad, a strange girl preparing her lunch beside him randomly looks over and asks what he's writing. "It's my plan," he mischievously answers. "For what?" she asks. "You'll see." Van Sant uses this brief but ominous dialogue to instill dread, but it's implausible that this girl would even notice Alex taking notes beside her, let alone care enough to question him. While Michelle is running alongside her classmates during gym, she suddenly pauses and looks up at the cloudy sky as though she can sense the massacre on the horizon. You can almost hear Van Sant heavy-handedly directing her from behind the camera.
Van Sant's own version of a "shower scene" -- by which Eric gets into the shower with Alex and the pair makes out -- is completely unnecessary. In no scene before or after is there any indication of a secretive homosexual relationship between Alex and Eric. For that matter, there's no evidence that their real-life counterparts were involved in a tryst either. It's just randomly inserted into this one throwaway scene for shock value. Cinematographically, their tryst is tastefully filmed from outside the shower door, opaque with steam to obscure underage nudity or graphic, up-close kissing. In a similar failure to elicit cheap shock, Alex's poorly motivated decision to shoot Eric pointlessly contradicts the outcome of the real-life massacre.
The most striking and divisive aspect of Elephant is Van Sant's cinema-verite shooting technique that betrays Elephant's origin as a documentary. Composed of interminable tracking shots meant to immerse viewers into the lives of these characters, cinematographer Harris Savides voyeuristically follows the 12 central characters in Van Sant's screenplay from their front, side, and behind as they nonchalantly walk into their high school, down hallways, and into various rooms such as the principal's office, cafeteria, ladies' bathroom, library, darkroom, locker room, and gymnasium. Sometimes, Savides will transform a tracking shot into a wide shot. Nowhere is this more intoxicating than in the introduction of Eli (Elias McConnell). After taking snapshots of a gothic couple, Eli begins walking to school, and Savides pauses the camera behind him to accentuate the beautiful scenery of the park: the baby-blue sky, green grass, leafy trees, and colored leaves strewn on the ground to indicate fall. At random points throughout, Van Sant, pulling triple duty as his own editor, will cut away to a shot of an overcast sky, painted in a sickly mint-green hue that evokes Bojan Bazelli's color palette in The Ring. Accompanied by a rumble of thunder to create an ominous atmosphere of impending doom, the rapidly moving clouds portend that both a literal and metaphorical storm is brewing.
Initially, Savides' use of tracking shots accomplishes its goal of reeling the viewer into the story. Very quickly, however, the technique wears out its welcome and grows painfully repetitive, pretentious, and pointless, tempting the viewer to scream, "cut!" Scene after scene, Elephant is just following characters from one location to the next. Van Sant is under the false impression that mercilessly slow camera movements equate to an immersive, hypnotic spell. As a thunderstorm growls overhead, Savides pans his camera slowly over Alex and Eric as they sleep in the former's basement. The afternoon prior, he rotates the camera around the basement as Alex plays "Moonlight Sonata" by Beethoven on his piano and Eric plays the shooting game on his laptop. As the camera spins in a circle, no visual insight is uncovered into the home life of Alex; his wardrobe doesn't display threatening clothing and neither his bed nor walls contain violent or Nazi-like paraphernalia. So what's the point of the glacial rotations?
As his own editor, Van Sant allows Savides' tracking shots to linger for far too long, stretching what should be a svelte 81 minutes beyond the breaking point and making the shorter-than-average runtime feel substantially and punishingly longer. He retreads conversations from different characters' perspectives to no purpose. Take the scene where John McFarland (John Robinson) and Eli meet up in the hallway, and Eli takes a snapshot of John while Michelle (Kristen Hicks) awkwardly runs by. Van Sant repeats this moment three times from the viewpoints of all three participants. No new line or crucial piece of information is revealed in each repeat. Van Sant opens his story on the morning of the school shooting to express its inherent unremarkability; this is just another boring day at school like any other, with no sinister warning signs to brace its characters for what's about to transpire. Then Van Sant rewinds the clock to the previous day to detail the strategic planning of the soon-to-be shooters. In the cafeteria, Alex takes notes concealed from the viewer, possibly mapping out the location of where to begin the shooting. The following morning, as Alex and Eric excitedly discuss their plans, Van Sant flashes forward to snippets of their shooting to foreshadow the looming massacre. In effect, all this technique accomplishes is undermining suspense. In a smart move that helps to rebuild some of it, when Eric and Alex cock their guns, Van Sant cuts to reaction shots of two of their first victims, Michelle and Eli, building anticipation for the impending blow.
Before filming commenced on Elephant, Van Sant had not written a script. Rather, the script was written to its final form during shooting, with a cast of nonprofessional actors improvising their lines and collaborating in the direction of scenes. And boy, does it show. Five years earlier, a similar approach was taken by film students Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez for their groundbreaking found-footage chiller, The Blair Witch Project, for which the duo wrote a 35-page screenplay with all dialogue to be improvised by a low-budget cast. The difference there is that the actors assembled for Myrick and Sanchez' debut, while unknown and decidedly non-Hollywood, came equipped with the required strong improvisational skills. From the instant Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard, and Mike Williams stepped before the camera, there was never a doubt that these were real would-be documentarians who would become hopelessly lost in the woods, their lives now in the hands of a sadistic, vengeful witch with no intention of letting them return home. The only ways to determine that their dialogue isn't scripted is because it's so natural and unforced, and their performances raw and gut-wrenching. The same praise cannot be showered on the cast of Elephant, who, with the exception of two actors, betray their lack of experience in front of a camera. Most of these kids really are high school students acting for the first time, and they would just barely cut it in their school's stage play.
When we first meet John, he's being driven to school by his father (Timothy Bottoms), whose inebriation causes him to drive into the side of a parked car and nearly run over a biker. Consequently, John makes his dad switch places with him, and he drives himself to school, pleading with his dad to wait in the car while he phones his brother, Paul, to pick their dad up. John conveys a perpetual concern for his alcoholic father and the burden it's placed on him without talking about it, wearing the stress on his pale face, tinged with red blotches on his cheeks, beneath a mop of surfer-dude blond hair. A prolonged look into Robinson's mournful, naive eyes makes clear that this isn't the first time he's had to clean up his father's alcohol-fueled mess. The only instance in which his performance strikes a false note is when he's required to vent his sorrow in private. Secluding himself in an unoccupied room, Robinson buries his face in his hands and wipes his visibly dry eyes to simulate crying.
Nathan Tyson's ineptitude with both improvisation and basic emotional realism reveals itself in the final scene, in which he and his girlfriend, Carrie (Carrie Finklea), are cornered in a freezer and held at gunpoint. Tyson's pleas for their lives are unconvincing, with stilted, cringe-making lines like "Dude, come on, don't do this" and "You stupid fuck, what the hell are you doing?" Finklea doesn't fare much better, repeatedly whimpering the same one generic line over and over: "Please."
The reason why Van Sant's relentless recycling of tracking shots almost instantly loses its immersion is because the characters within them, aside from Alex and John, are uniformly one-dimensional, flat, and unengaging. Because I don't care about most of these nonentities, constantly following them around their school as they enter one door and exit another quickly grates on my nerves and numbs me to their fate. Contrast them with the protagonists of The Long Walk, whose distinctive, engaging, and complex personalities emerge and evolve through scintillating dialogue during the course of a five-day walkathon. In Elephant, the characters are often walking by themselves, consequently receiving zero dialogue to define or distinguish them.
Eli is a photography student who's building his portfolio via taking snapshots of his peers and developing them in the darkroom. He's so dedicated to his craft that when he notices Eric and Alex preparing to shoot up the library in which he's standing, his immediate instinct is to snap a picture of them on his camera, thereby drawing their attention to him. Michelle is a nerd who's so ashamed of her legs that she continuously shows up to her gym class in leggings instead of the required shorts. It makes no sense why she's embarrassed of her legs when the primary culprit is her distinctly mannish face. While she isn't shown to be bullied, as would be expected by her timid demeanor and unsightly appearance, Michelle appears to be friendless and uncommunicative, keeping to herself in the locker room and speaking only in terse replies to the adults.
Benny (Bennie Dixon) is a football jock defined by the horror-movie-level of idiocy he displays in his single solo scene. After the shooting has commenced, Benny decides to take a stroll through the hallway to see what's going on, never once stopping or turning around at the sight of other students running in a panic in the opposite direction. After chivalrously helping Acadia escape from a classroom window, rather than following her, Benny inexplicably turns around, leaves the safety of the room, and returns to the danger of the hallway, literally walking straight up behind Eric, who's aiming a gun at Principal Luce (Matt Malloy) on the floor. Naturally, Benny suffers a similar fate to Dick Hallorann in The Shining, minus the sympathy. It's the type of irrational character behavior parodied in the opening of Scary Movie, where Carmen Electra is faced with two signposts in her backyard: Safety and Death, and, unable to make a considered decision while being chased by Ghostface, she chooses the latter.
While Benny is by far the dumbest character in Elephant, the most irritating and stereotypical are a trio of junior girls named Brittany, Jordan, and Nicole (Brittany Mountain, Jordan Taylor, and Nicole George), who have been best friends since freshman year. They're bulimic bitches who vent their mutual frustration over their parents' controlling and distrustful personalities and cautiously select their lunches while mentioning the amount of fat contained in salad dressings. None of their names are spoken aloud, so it's impossible to know who's who, and since their personalities are practically identical and plastic, it doesn't matter. So suffice to say, one of them chastises another for wanting to split her time evenly between her girlfriends and her boyfriend, paving the way for the most repetitive and annoying dialogue that betrays all three girls' lack of experience with improvisation. Essentially, the two squabblers repeat the same lines in slightly different words; the aggressor insists that best friends should always be prioritized over boyfriends, and the receiver repeats that she has to divide her time evenly between them. Meanwhile, the third girl just sits there until the leader of the group says she's going shopping after school, to which the previously silent observer cheerfully says, "Sounds like fun, I'll go." Not a realistic response. As a result, when the trio walks into a bathroom and simultaneously purges themselves of the minimal food they consumed, I feel no sympathy for their bulimia. Nathan is a member of his school's football team and a lifeguard, as evinced by a red hoodie with the job title written plainly on the back. He's also shown to be a part-time bully, as he and a classmate take turns pelting Alex with spit balls in science class. And Carrie is... his attractive girlfriend.
When the moment of truth finally rears its ugly head, Van Sant presents the school shooting tactfully, never threatening to revel in his gunmen's bloodshed or linger on the physical or psychological agony of their victims. Every time Alex and Eric pull their triggers, Savides keeps his camera pinned on their faces, amplifying the blasts of their gunshots. Some victims are shown collapsing to the floor in the distance. To keep his movie firmly grounded in the exploitation-free realm of drama, Van Sant uses a negligible supply of blood. For the first kill, Michelle falls back against a bookshelf, across which a splatter of blood is briefly thrown. After Nate, a GSA member, collapses from a bullet, an adult drags his seemingly dry corpse away from the door, revealing a trail of blood beneath him. The triple homicide of Brittany, Jordan, and Nicole is only implied when Alex enters the girls' bathroom and Van Sant cuts to the next scene, leaving their fates both unseen yet heavily obvious. In terms of the director's presentation of the lurid details of his source material, Elephant plays like the antithesis of Jim Van Bebber's The Manson Family. Where Van Bebber bathed his audience in a fountain of gore and unbridled, X-rated nudity, Van Sant takes the more solemn, telemovie-friendly route. In terms of general acting talent, however, both dramatizations sit on similarly amateurish footing.
While Elephant lacks a traditional, original score, with much of the movie playing out in natural silence, Van Sant sporadically incorporates Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" to complement his dreary atmosphere. The music takes on a more poignant meaning when it's played diegetically on a piano by Alex, its slow, hypnotic, melancholic, and hauntingly beautiful melody reflecting his talent as the potential pianist he could have become had he not succumbed to his darker impulses.
Elephant doesn't have an "ending," so much as it just ends abruptly and arbitrarily. Upon locating Carrie and Nathan in a freezer, Alex aims his shotgun at them and tauntingly recites "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" to decide whom to shoot first while they unconvincingly plead for their lives. We never make it to the point where police arrive at the school, a SWAT team enters the building prepared to counterattack, or ambulances escort any surviving victims to the nearest hospital. Savides tracks his camera backward to withhold the identity of the chosen first victim, and a split second before Alex makes his decision, Van Sant cuts to the end credits. Since both characters are all but guaranteed to die, there's no suspense in not knowing which one will die first. What difference does it make? Whoever bites the bullet first, the next is granted a measly extra second or two. Why does this scene feel like the appropriate time to call it quits?
It's easy and respectable to recognize what Van Sant is aiming for with Elephant. Columbine is one of the most devastating and groundbreaking tragedies in American history, and its effects reverberate through likeminded school shootings 26 years later. Utilizing this story as the basis for a fictionalized drama required a great deal of restraint and realism on its filmmaker's part, and he treats it with the directness, simplicity, ambiguity, and tact it deserves. Van Sant doesn't beat his audience over the head with an anti-gun, anti-video game, or anti-bullying message. He doesn't go the horror route and appeal to the appetites of bloodhounds with carnage candy and a high body count. He simply tells a story about the randomness and unpredictability of violence in America, using the supposedly safe confines of a high school as a microcosm.
Unfortunately, in his effort to convey the mundanity of the day before and morning of the real-life shooting, with his slow camera movements and aimlessly repetitive tracking shots of uninteresting characters wandering around campus, the emotional effect Van Sant achieves is exactly that: mundane. Not absorbingly mundane or hypnotically dreamlike. More like sitting in detention for nearly an hour and a half: simple and physically painless, but excruciatingly boring.
5.2/10
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