P.S. AK-47.
Elephant plays with scandalized and bewildered memories of Columbine news reports. Its style is almost documentary-like?uninflected and precise, except that Elephant never becomes psycho- or socio-analytical. The events occur during a fateful morning and afternoon one cloudy school day in autumn, somewhere in a Northwestern American suburb. Van Sant's primary trope is a series of tracking shots. His camera trails good-looking students (Gus' usual jailbait) through the hallways, classrooms and around the campus. He expects a certain sophistication in the audience's perception of these long takes?a sensitivity to the way cinema records life opposed to Tarantino's superficial gimmickry.
Our investment in these schoolhouse perambulations makes hash of the overpraised, remote effeteness in Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark. Everywhere Van Sant peeks (the football field, gymnasium, lunchroom, physics class and, of course, photography class), school is fully in-session. Van Sant elicits dread with each forward-moving increment. That's because this is a post-Kubrick trope?although Van Sant admits imitating the long, traveling shots of British neorealist filmmaker Alan Clarke (who directed the 1990 Elephant, a tv movie on urban racism and poverty). In several scenes, he retraces the same space and time but from a different student's perspective. Not just fancifully fracturing time as Tarantino does, Van Sant implies that he's filling in what was overlooked the first go-round.
By multiplying and expanding points of view, Van Sant pretends to fully animate the margins (and the marginal experiences) that most movies accustom us to overlooking. However, some of this technique is naive. In the press kit, producer Dany Wolf claims, "Gus doesn't do a lot of fast editing. He doesn't use technique to tell the audience where to look and what to feel." But that's exactly what directors do. Even Clarke understands that style-enhanced vision; yet he also explored his lower-class subjects through improvisation. Van Sant's vision of a doomed and dangerous nubile high school is as rigorously controlled as Kubrick's Overlook Hotel. As with Kubrick, what we're shown is unpleasant: One nerdy student, hefty, bespectacled Michelle (Kristen Hicks), runs down a hallway past the more prepossessing students Van Sant has already introduced, on the way to her fate.
Whoever Michelle is, she gets it right in the head. Most of Elephant's students seem too uniformly glamo and mature for high school. They're basically stick figures, Dawson's Creek icons who, in cinematographer Harris Savides' admirably plain visual style, are only differentiated by their brightly colored clothes (a red sweater, a varsity jersey, a yellow t-shirt). Fact is, Van Sant's cool detachment siphons the characters' humanity. The opening scene of tow-headed, red-cheeked John (John Robinson) being driven to school by his drunken father (Timothy Bottoms) is the film's best. Bottoms, carrying his Last Picture Show resonance, makes a credibly, lyrically fogged parent; fundamentally too weak to guide his own child. This briefly sketched pathetic relationship better explains the true sociology of Columbine than Michael Moore's polemical tirade in Bowling for Columbine. But acknowledging chaos in hindsight is one thing; in present sight?and Elephant's technique makes every scene insistently present-tense?the film's ease with social chaos is unacceptable. Ultimately, too cool.
Without using the names of real-life perpetrators or victims, Van Sant assumes that the Columbine tragedy is already well-understood, and so is best served by a blank, affectless depiction. Here's where the film loses its humanism. Van Sant's unaffected style implies there is no meaning to be found in these events. But I think people who respond to Elephant (bringing their personal anxiety to it) will nevertheless be exercising basic, age-old, emotional needs. In times of crisis, we do indeed resort to art and seek catharsis?a fact David Lynch displayed memorably in the first episode of Twin Peaks when high school students are distracted by their intuition of grief.
Van Sant used to have that kind of instinct. The existential, lonesome road of My Own Private Idaho complemented the tender longing that River Phoenix's rudderless hustler expressed. Since then something horrible has happened to Van Sant; his own outlaw intuition has succumbed to a new style of hipster narcissism. Some moments in Elephant hint that his bad instincts could go right?as when he veers toward the secret vanity and bigotry of a new generation of narcissists. But although Elephant is made with undeniable esthetic integrity, it is emotionally incoherent in the way it is intended to be both cool and shocking, detached and poignant.
What is this strange thing, a hipster requiem? Eric (Eric Deulen), one of the two shooters, is a piano student whose fumbling over Beethoven's The Moonlight Sonata and Für Elise accompanies some of those long tracking shots. Van Sant may be going for the mundane, social-climbing Americana that the Coen brothers achieved with Beethoven in The Man Who Wasn't There, but his script doesn't make it clear that Eric and his weapon-wielding partner Alex (Alex Frost) aspire to art or anything not awesome, or sweet. To neglect motivation for the killings is the simplest cop-out, the easiest response to the nation's perplexity.
Yet that doesn't stop Van Sant from hinting at myriad, unnerving causes. Ranging from homophobia to superstition, he indicts spitball cruelty in a classroom, a trio of bulimic girls vomiting behind lavatory stalls, a satanic car air-freshener, darkening Godardian cloudscapes and, yes, media. Eric and Alex play violent video games, and while unwrapping a mail-ordered rifle, the boys casually watch a tv documentary on Nazis (Hollywood's convenient bugaboo). But it doesn't matter which banality of evil the tv is blaring (be it Nazis or Barbara Walters' The View) if Van Sant doesn't seek out the roots of teenage disaffection.
Glancing over the larger point that, for today's undereducated, morally ungrounded youth, history is just an echoing noise, his camera also glances over Eric and Alex's personalities. "I've never really kissed anybody, have you?" Alex asks as he steps into the shower with Eric. They could be gay or just lonely, experimenting teens, but this scene teases in the same trite way as teen-slasher movies.
In spite of our desire to have Columbine artistically commemorated, the massacre itself?slowly, and trickily played out?uses devices no different than those in slasher movies. It's a discomforting blend of neorealist art and bullcrap. As Alex marches through school aiming and shooting, he smiles slightly, each kill an achievement. Walking toward the prom-queen/quarterback cute couple Nate and Carrie (Nathan Tyson and Carrie Finklea), Alex's blurry figure steadily comes into threatening focus. Finally pinning the lovebirds in the cafeteria, Van Sant frames two sides of raw beef hanging in the walk-in freezer rather than showing their deaths?a ludicrously "tasteful" symbol worthy of Mario Bava. And, yes, the token black teen Benny (Bennie Dixon) shows an unnatural curiosity amidst the firebombing and shootings leading to his own gratuitous end (another nod to The Shining).
No sane viewers would permit themselves to mistake Van Sant's reenactment for anything less than tragic. But most people will leave Elephant with no greater understanding of Columbine, just a revived sadness. Instead of enlightening our sympathy, Van Sant uses Columbine as a new Rorschach test. Rather than rip off Alan Clarke, Elephant should have been titled Dreaming of Columbine