Elephant Review
by Robin Clifford (robin AT reelingreviews DOT com)October 24th, 2003
"Elephant"
It's a normal, sunny fall day for the students of a Portland, Oregon high school. School photographer Elias (Elias McConnell) snap pictures of other students; Nate Nathan Tyson) meets his girlfriend Carrie (Carrie Finklea) after playing football; John (John Robinson) confiscates his drunken father's (Timothy Bottoms) car keys and leaves them in the office for his brother to pickup; Michelle (Kristen Hicks) rushes to the library; Brittany (Brittany Mountain), Jordan (Jordan Taylor) and Nicole (Nicole George) gossip, complain their snooping mothers and purge their lunches. John crosses paths with Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deiden) while leaving the building and is warned not to come back by the camo-clad pair. Suddenly, it is not such a normal day, anymore, in "Elephant."
Director/write/editor Gus Van Sant proves, once again, that he is an innovative and experiment filmmaker who can work every level of his medium from low budget, gritty independent films like "Drugstore Cowboy" to mainstream work like "Finding Forrester." With his latest effort Van Sant returns to his independent roots and brings us into a real high school with real students as he recreates a fictional version of that fateful day when two heavily-armed teenagers walked into their high school in Columbine, Colorado.
Utilizing a minimalist script, the helmer gives his newcomer actors a great deal of latitude in forming their characters as his cameras follow each of their subjects through the halls, on the campus grounds, into the classroom, cafeteria and, even, the girl's room. Van Sant must have become enamored with filming people walking when he did the avant-garde "Gerry" because much of "Elephant's" 81 minute run time is footage of the protagonists walking and walking and walking. But, somehow, he manages to integrate this routine, almost hypnotic, action into the film as the tension builds to the movie's inevitable conclusion.
The structure of "Elephant" is one of the things that make this nominal effort intriguing to watch. In a "Roshomon" like style, you follow each of the story's students during the course of the day that will change their world. The film keeps jumping back in time as the camera follows each student. You get, over the course of the film, the same scenes but from the different characters' perspectives. Van Sant handles the time shifts effortlessly, with the different viewpoints matching perfectly, and shows his mettle as a master filmmaker.
"Elephant" is a well-crafted film with its highly mobile camerawork by Harris Savides keeping up with the day-to-day activity in an average high school. Sound designer Leslie Shatz muffles the dialogue to help keep the just another-day-tone nature of things, until it matters what is said. The young performers are not professional actors but they give real enough performances. None are really fleshed out and there is little reason given as to why two boys would lash out in such a cold-blooded and heinous way - Alex is picked on in class, seems enamored of Nazism and has a homosexual relationship with Eric. But, I think that is the point of Van Sant's work - he does not deign to have the answers. Instead, he simply tells us of the event and the people it impacts.
I give it a B.
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