Movies into Film

Elephant

Directed by Gus Van Sant

USA, 2003

School Days

Alex Frost in Elephant (Photo: Fine Line Features)

Elephant reunites Gus Van Sant with the two craftsmen who made his failed film Gerry such a marvel, technically. Cinematographer Harris Savides and sound designer Leslie Shatz once again collaborate, and this time the results are magnificent.

Taking the Columbine shootings as its subtext, Elephant opens on an untroubled expanse of blue sky. The blue gradually darkens to pitch black; distant sounds of a game on a playing field pipe on. Right away, the filmmakers have found beauty in the ominous.

I’ve never seen a film about violence as tender as this. Tender in its treatment of characters (most of whom I grew a little bit fond before they were gunned down) and respectful of an audience not wanting bloodshed used as pornography for the umpteenth occasion. Van Sant splatters red in only two deaths; the point made, the rest of the killings are heard but not seen. It’s a brave choice, but one consistent with the mise-en-scène throughout Elephant: the actors in the frame often aren’t the ones talking—they listen silently as voices swirl around them.

An ordinary film on this subject might begin by introducing the killers. Van Sant allows us to spend some time with the victims first. Among them, the director’s favorite (I suspect) is the photographer Eli (Elias McConnell), whom we observe in detail as he composes images and develops film. The camera practically makes love to this dimpled young Portlander, and in the extended tracking shots that trail Eli through endless hallways, Savides renders the background interiors in soft, gauzy focus, transmuting fluorescent light strikingly, almost hallucinogenically, while keeping Eli’s profile sharply drawn. These scenes swoosh with an undercurrent of dread. They may well be the most unnerving (and exhilarating) tracking shots since Angie Dickinson roamed museum corridors in search of sex in Dressed to Kill.

Elias McConnell (Photo: Fine Line Features)

Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen), the two boys who bear arms against their classmates, are intriguing opposites. In the film’s most powerful scene, the camera languorously pans Alex’s bedroom as Alex, at the piano, plays the slow movement from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata while Eric, a peroxide butch, picks off videogame victims on a laptop. The audaciousness gets better. Eric later sidles up to Alex in the shower, exclaiming, “I’ve never even kissed anybody, have you?” They engage in a joyless make-out session, having greeted the mail order arrival of their assault rifles with greater euphoria.

Elephant won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last spring, and this fallible indicator of quality is, for a change, right on the mark. It is the best work Van Sant has ever done. Elephant shows a command of the medium not present even in his supposedly halcyon days of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. Although it’s still too soon for “10 best” palaver, I would place Elephant a slightly distant third after Stone Reader and American Splendor. – NPT

October 2003

Movies into Film

npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com

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