Sunday, May 11, 2008
Gus Van Sant's vapid high-school-shooting film is part Columbine art project, part exploitation flick.
Oct 24, 2003 | This past summer the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the people who put on the New York Film Festival each fall, ran a festival of CinemaScope movies at its Walter Reade Theater in Manhattan. Among the selections was 1969's "Play Dirty," a war story that is exceptionally well directed (by André de Toth) and is also one of the most cynical and sour action movies imaginable. After the press screening for "Play Dirty," a colleague and I were talking about the irony of seeing it in the plush environs of Lincoln Center when, if we had been reviewing movies in 1969, we would have seen it in a 42nd Street grind house.
The grind houses are gone now that Times Square has been cleaned up by Disney, among others. But the spirit of the grind houses lives on in the art house. At least three or four times a year now, a foreign or indie movie appears whose main selling point is the same gore-and-sex combo that used to lure audiences into the grind houses. Theaters no longer pass out barf bags as they did for "Mark of the Devil," but the ads for Gaspar Noé's "Irreversible" made sure to mention the couple of hundred audience members who stormed out of the film's Cannes screening during the nine-minute unbroken-take rape scene. The gruesome climax of Noé's previous movie, "I Stand Alone," was preceded by a flourish right out of William Castle, a blinking red "WARNING!" sign that alerted moviegoers, "You have 30 seconds to leave the theater." Essentially, this is the same "Can You Take It?" come-on that exploitation producers used to promise grind-house patrons that their movie delivered the dirty goods.
Headlines were always good fodder for the grind house. But 30 years ago a movie like "Survive!" (about the Andes plane crash where surviving soccer players cannibalized their dead teammates) or "Guyana, Cult of the Damned" (about the Jonestown massacre) went straight to drive-ins and second-run houses. Today, Gus Van Sant's "Elephant," which is more or less about the Columbine High School shootings, wins the Palme d'Or at Cannes and is selected for the New York Film Festival.
"Elephant" is too austere, too formalized, to satisfy the exploitation crowd. Most of the movie consists of endless tracking shots, as cinematographer Harris Savides' camera simply follows characters through the (strangely unpopulated) halls of a suburban high school. What gives "Elephant" the air of an exploitation movie is the gut-squeezing sensation you get watching it. As in movies like "Boys Don't Cry" or "The Accused," "Elephant" exists in an atmosphere of queasy anticipation of the atrocity you know is coming at the end. And with the exception of one cafeteria scene, there seem to be only about 10 or 12 people in the entire school, so we know that the characters we're watching are the very ones who are going to get it. Sure enough, the massacre comes on schedule.
"Elephant"
Written and directed by Gus Van Sant
Starring Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell
It would be crediting "Elephant" with too much depth to call it Van Sant's examination of Columbine. It's more like his Columbine art project. Van Sant's xerox copy of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" seemed like nothing so much as a gigantic Cindy Sherman installation, and something similar characterizes "Elephant." The film has been described as naturalistic, but the look and the blankness of the atmosphere is very achieved. It may be true, as has been charged, that the French loved "Elephant" because it conforms to their idea of America as a mindless, gun-ridden charnel house. The movie, though, is too dead to be a diatribe.
Van Sant doesn't depict the suburban high school and middle-class homes with anything approaching loathing; he'd have to work up some passion before he could loathe anything. He and Savides are going for an avant-garde anthropological look. They shoot the interiors as airless dioramas. Van Sant gets something of the texture of high-school life -- the sense of suspended time, the boredom -- but he never goes beneath the surface. Compared to Frederick Wiseman's 1968 cinema-vérité documentary "High School" (which appears to have been one of Van Sant's models), "Elephant" offers nothing of the interactions of high school, the feelings of students trying to be themselves in the face of petty authority. This is the type of movie that inevitably gets praised as being a corrective to the Hollywood view of high school. But nothing in it rings as true as the best moments in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" or "Carrie" or the early seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
The cast of "Elephant" comprises actual high-school students with no professional acting experience, culled from various schools in Portland, Ore. They are not called on to give performances, because Van Sant isn't interested in exploring teenagers as much as in fetishizing them. The camera lavishes more attention on one boy's blond surfer hair, or on the clothes the kids wear, than on the kids themselves. The characters here serve the same purpose as the furnishings in the school and the kids' middle-class homes: They're static details in Van Sant's composed frames. This preoccupation with texture means that Van Sant has nothing to tell us about why events like Columbine happen.
To be fair, he's not required to do so, and any filmmaker who gives us reasons for the inexplicable risks trivializing it. In last Sunday's New York Times, Van Sant told Karen Durbin that assigning the blame for school killings to rap or video games is "a way of scapegoating ... The movie is about avoiding that, by just observing the last day, where you see evidence of different things that hopefully spur your own imaginings about the meaning of the event." But to successfully work in that way takes a richer, more articulate approach than Van Sant's faux naturalism allows for. Van Sant took the title of the movie from the late English filmmaker Alan Clarke's film on violence in Northern Ireland. Clarke said he meant the title to refer to the elephant in the room that nobody speaks of. If "Elephant" is Van Sant's way of talking about the roots of high school violence, it would have been better if he'd shut up.
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