Elephant [Blu-ray]

...as brilliantly realistic a film about high-school angst as one could imagine or need. There's no intrigue, and without any reason, it all ends in slaughter. The removal of media melodrama and predictable sentiment only heightens the impact of what actually happens here. An intellectual tour-de-force about adolescents - explored with a dull intensity that's interesting, insidious and perfect.
This British blu-ray represents the film with a superior transfer and no extras, a perfect choice for this particular film.

Sometimes its worth looking at a film like this and examining whether it was showered with acclaim because its actually any good or because it's a fashionable subject. In the case of Elephant the praise was completely justified as this is a movie that succeeds in everything it sets out to do.

Elephant is an odd little film that sets out to juxtapose the ordinariness of the daily situation with the extremity of its outcome. To that end the cast was set during a casting call for local high school students in director Gus Van Sant's hometown. The resulting cast were largely not (at the time) professional actors and the roles they would play were in many cases moulded by the teenagers themselves. As Van Sant explains in an interview extra the characters are also teen movie archetypes to an extent and this serves to make the school that acts as the setting seem familiar. At just under 80 minutes long the film chronicles the final hour in the day of the characters leading up to an event that will (without wanting to make it too melodramatic) shatter their lives. In that hour the lives of the characters intersect, however briefly, and this is mixed in with parts of the 24 hours previously for two of their number.

Essentially Elephant is a fictionalised rendering of a High School shooting spree, heavily influenced by the infamous Columbine Massacre. To that end it is set as an ordinary school day until the first shot is fired. Long, dialogue free, stretches abound as characters move from one place to the next. Some of the characters are likeable, others are not so likeable, its clear though that they are teenagers and none deserve to die. Van Sant makes no effort to lay blame for this kind of event. When Alex, the mastermind of the shooting, begins to work his masterplan it could be for any number of reasons. He is being bullied, he may not be entirely sane, he is an outsider whose only real friend is not on his level, he is a latch key kid, he plays violent video games, guns are easy to come by. Any one or all of these may be ultimately the cause of the violence and death that make up the last 20 minutes or so of the movie. Its not movie violence either- there's no heavy metal soundtrack or pithy one liners, and there's no dramatic poses or improbable physicality. Only a palpable feeling of terror and a lack of apprehension.

Films like Elephant are necessarily rare. We watch movies to escape, not to have to face up to grim realities. Films like Elephant are also necessary. In this movie Van Sant isn't apportioning blame or providing easy answers. He's not trying to tell us the answers, only to make us face up to the harsh reality of the questions. The elephant in the room here is how a society can allow its children to massacre each other no matter what the cause. Highly recommended.

Reading the reviewers of Van Sant's Elephant, you get the feeling that there is a very definite split between the audience. People either love it or hate it - there doesn't seem to be any grey area. Unfortunately (or furtunately, depending on how you choose to look at it), this is probably the best way to describe challenging and ambitious art cinema - doesn't this rule generally apply to most avant guarde films that are considered the best of their time?

It's true Elephant is long, and nothing happens for about an hour, you do merely follow students around the corridors of a school, and yes the killers are surprisingly cliche. And these are the elements that people will base the fact of loving or hating the film.

One of the major problems of a film like this and the subject that it is tackling is that it will gain a large recognition. And because of this it will be given more of a mainstream audience than it probably would have done otherwise. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that a large number of people going to see a film like this that is tackling a hot topic of the day will be unprepared for the unconventional, voyeuristic piece of art filmmaking that will unravel. Film students, and people well conversed in filmic conventions and styles will, more often than not, love it as it subverts and offers new conventions. But to an audience that is more accustomed to watching 'normal' films, it will strike a barron and boring chord.

So does this mean that the film is boring and pointless? No of course not, and it is also not a film that is merely preaching to the converted, as even that has much to teach and bring to filmmaking and so is definetly not futile. In the end the film is what it is, the audience will get out of it what they bring, and probably the ones that find it boring are the ones that are more used to having narrative set up in the standard way.

Obviously, I found the film to be extremeley rewarding and I got a lot out of it, but then I've done a film studies course and am going into filmmaking. I thought the first hour was very clever and needed the slow uneventful burn, you needed to know that these were real, normal people, you neeeded to become accustomed to them. The killing needed to be numbing senseless and real.

The prblem with films like this and others like Monsters Ball is that they reach the wrong audience, one that cannot deal with real emotion and reality as they have been raised on hollywood films that subvert reality - which is fine, but makes it very hard for them to deal with anything but, it also has a very narrowing effect on film culture.