Elephant
(2003)
Dir: Gus Van Sant
All school shooting content aside, this is probably the most accurate cinematic stab at recreating suburbia high school that I have yet to see. The Steinbeck-like opening sequence, of an evening sky turning to night as boys can be heard playing, sets the tone for a movie that seems to be more about the gentle textures of a timeline, than any specific tragedy; wherein a day, becomes and organism. Characters are introduced, and events are foreshadowed to form a patchwork puzzle that tidily unfolds with morbid simplicity. The ample time that is taken following various students as they move throughout the high school, and interact with other students, remains subtle as it morphs from casual and foreboding, to direct and chilling. The elaborate camera work smartly accentuates the wandering temperament of a school day--even as the school day becomes the scene of a massacre. Although Elephant is an interpretation of the Columbine shootings, the movie admirably avoids sensationalizing what has such raw potential for typical cinematic gloss. Based on the thinly-veiled jubilation with which the national news media covered the tragedy, I can only imagine the glamorization that the inevitable made-for-television account of the real event will bring with it (if Hillary Duff is cast as Cassie Bernall, it‘s time to leave the country). Whereas that looming dramatization will probably lay heavily into Marilyn Manson and Doom, Elephant sets its calamity to haunting snippets of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” and “Fur Elise” piano sonatas. In one scene, Alex, the story’s approximation of Eric Harris, practices No.14 in C Sharp Major on a piano in his basement bedroom, while his cohort, Eric, plays a coldly anonymous, first-person shooter on a laptop. The cast features actual high school students, who share their real first names with their respective characters. They do a hauntingly dissonant job of being real teenagers, and Van Sant handles these performances with aplomb, never letting any one character become a stereotype, giving the film an air of actuality. Even the shooters, Eric and Alex, aren’t painted as hardcore “outcasts,” Elephant just lets them be, “fucking insane.” I think this shows more respect for the tragedy than harping on any, and every, external excuse for the bloodshed. On an even more cryptic side note, the first character the film introduces us to is, John, a surf-headed kid, who is being driven to school by his drunken father, played by actor Timothy Bottoms. Bottoms sideswipes a parked car and rear-ends another, before John makes him pull over so that he can drive. What’s uncanny about this boozy performance, is that the very next movie Bottoms starred in was, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, as none other than our habitually drunk driving, commander in chief, George W. Bush. Yeah, trippy.
