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Amazon.co.uk Review
Elephant, the elegant and unsettling movie from Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting), depicts students at a high school before and during a harrowing, Columbine-style shooting. The movie follows one young boy who takes over the wheel from his drunken dad while returning from lunch, then loops back in time and follows another student who crosses paths with the first, then loops back and follows another--all captured in long, unedited tracking shots that are serene and unhurried, even when two boys in camouflage gear, carrying heavy bags, arrive at the school and begin shooting. Elephant doesn't attempt to explain their behaviour; it simply places the audience back in the brief yet interminable window of adolescence, when life is trivial and painfully important at the same time. Your reaction to Elephant will depend as much on your life experiences as anything in the movie itself. --Bret Fetzer
Special Features
- Rare interview with Gus van Sant
- From Elephant to Elephant - comparison of the two films
- In School With Elephant
- Trailers
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The elephant in the room,
By Phil Hattie "Stuff lover" (Glasgow, Scotland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Elephant [DVD] [2004] (DVD)
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.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Realist cinema at its best,
By
This review is from: Elephant [DVD] [2004] (DVD)
Understated, elegant and serene, yet at the same time bold, powerful and haunting, Gus Van Sant's 'Elephant' is a superb piece of ultra-realist filmmaking. Taking the documentary-style legacy of 'Kids' to new levels, 'Elephant' is more of a work of art than entertaiment.The quality of the film lies in the fact that it appreciates the power of subtlety to create a truly disturbing atmosphere which lodges itself in your mind and refuses to leave. At once realistic and yet strangely dreamlike, the camera follows a number of American students around a school, documenting the way their paths interject and recapturing the same events through different viewpoints. It is the ordinary, mundane existences of these characters which the film is trying to capture; Gus Van Sant is trying to show us what it is that is lost when people are indiscriminantly murdered. The fact that the audience is well aware of how the film is going to end only adds to this strangely real yet dreamlike quality, as does the haunting 'Moonlight Sonata' which accompanies much of the movement, and the violence, when it does come, is filmed in such a silent, almost logical way that it only serves as an extension of this mood. 'Elephant' is a snapshot of a moment in its character's lives in which time stands still and the ordinary becomes the unbelievable. If you want an entertaining, escapist experience then this isn't for you; if, on the other hand, you want an artistic, subtle and haunting cinematic experience, 'Elephant' will fulfill.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Exremely Good - not for everyone,
By A Customer
This review is from: Elephant [DVD] [2004] (DVD)
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.
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