Gus van Sant has the camera pointing upwards as Elephant begins. We gaze at the sky as it allows clouds to drift fluffily through it; it appears entirely empty of portents. A hazy, uneventful summer’s day seems in prospect, rather than a horrific Columbine-style high-school shooting that this movie summons up like a nightmare remembered with pitiless clarity.
With this stunningly effective film, Van Sant returns to his indie roots, blending them with a European sensibility. Two boys, acting without any compunction, remorse, rage, bitterness or obvious emotion of any kind, shoot up their high school with assault weapons they have ordered over the Internet.
Nothing about this movie is dramatic in the slightest: the cinematic locution is disconcertingly unviolent. There is no tension, no exclamatory score, no acceleration of editing; even the gunshots themselves are not as piercingly loud as we are accustomed to in movie thrillers. We are not even invited to feel the difference between the tragic nightmare unleashed by the killings and the innocent world that existed until that point. The time frame and sense of place is constructed so that we cannot even be sure when and where the shootings have begun.
Everything is dreamy, spacey, almost weightless. Van Sant and his cinematographer, Harris Savides, drift along corridors, into classrooms and offices, out on to sports fields and into kitchens and bedrooms, hooking up with various characters, revisiting the same events from different angles. It is as if nothing is happening in the here and now, but recalled through some medium that imposes a somnambulist slowness on everything: the look and sound of dead men walking.
We know what’s coming; we’ve known it all along. There’s no tension, just a sickly, gnawing sense that the horror has somehow spread backwards in time; normality is invested with an unearthly tingle of fear.
Elephant, with its dazed and disoriented feel, explores a clinical sense of shock. What Columbine meant continues to be a haunting question for a country in love with guns. Elephant is a compelling response. —