First, I would like to take the time to thank anyone who may have been reading my ramblings over the past few months. It's been a lot of fun and I plan to continue making blog entries until I run out of media to experience. As my role model William Shatner might say, That...may...take...a.............while. So thanks for reading!
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to watch Gus Van Zant's Elephant (2003). Elephant is a not to subtle fictional take on the Columbine tragedy. The movie was a little bizarre in that it was highly effective on an artistic level but it's view of teenage life was a little too cold for me. Between this and Last Days (2005), a movie I plan to watch soon that is supposed to be a fictional take on Kurt Cobain's suicide, I'm starting to think of Gus Van Zant as Mr. Instant Replay. It's like something monumental happens, Gus is there to give his fictional view of it. He walks a fine line between art and exploitation, but in Elephant he has enough talent to pull it off. Just barely though.
Elephant takes place at an affluent upper middle class highschool that looks suspiciously like...Columbine. It follows a handful of characters through their day, taking the time to focus on the mundane parts of their lives to really make the viewer live with them. It's a bold move, I've never seen a movie feature the backs of actors heads as prominently as Elephant. In this movie, if a character walks from one room to another, the camera follows the WHOLE walk in a medium closeup head shot from the back. It gets a little annoying, but anyone who has walked through a highschool hall will easily relate.
Other camera shots and sequences are very well photographed, they have a look of digital video clarity and have the framing of home video but the shot composition is almost poetic. Subjects flow in and out of frame and Van Zant clearly made careful choices in having the action of certain scenes off camera while visually focusing on a different subject entirely. A good example is a shot that introduces a character by showing a field where a class is in PE. It's a static wide shot where kids play football in the foreground while cheerleaders and runners move in the background. After about 3 minutes of this the character being introduced stops playing football and runs from the back of the shot to the front. This technique is effective in grounding the viewer in "reality" and giving context to the character (you assume he is a jock).
Elephant is sensitive and subtle in its depiction of the teenage killers. Many of the Columbine traits are there; the facination with heavy weaponry, Nazis and the general abuse they receive from other students. The movie tries hard to not pass judgement on these characters themselves than on the circumstances that surround them. The parents are portrayed as wealthy but uncaring (and almost invisible from the way they were shot outside of frame) . The two teens lack of parental influence, access to dangerous materials, television fed intellect and outsider status are illustrated to "support" the pathological frame of mind of these ticking time bombs.
What loses me about Elephant is the dim view it takes towards people. Almost all of the characters are put upon in some way, whether by an individual, the school or society. The adults are portrayed as hopelessly out of touch (or drunk), inflicting their pathos, power trips or indifference onto the teens. A cross section of teens are shown, a popular kid, a geek, a loner, a boyfriend with girlfriend, a trio of teen queen girls and the two outsiders. The tone of the movie and the portrayal of these characters seem to suggest that all teenagers struggle with loneliness to the point of self destruction with the two teen killers gleefully murdering other students as its biggest symptom. I can't quite buy into the cynical point of view taken here and takes a little out of the movie for me.
However, the ending where the massacre takes place is gripping and chilling. The matter-of-fact tone sets up the devastating view of the two teenage killers shooting other students as if they were in a video game. The scenes of other students fleeing from the school is a mirror image to newscasts from Columbine. Watching the two student killers finally show happiness when they're murdering people is fairly gut wrenching.
Elephant wins points for its re-enactment skills but ultimately the movie wants you take it both ways. It's an almost faithful illustration of a factual event played out as fiction to allow spin and probably dodge lawsuits. From an artistic point of view, the movie is amazing in its ability to tell a story of multiple characters and have the viewer feel like a "fly on the wall" of their lives. I can't recall seeing any recent movie with as much skilled technique as this one in both shooting and editing. But the fictional spin on a well documented actual event makes me wonder if I'm being sold imagination as fact. The line is blurred here, an artistic triumph that confuses real life issues. So I will split the difference and give Elephant an 5 out of 10.
