Gus Van Sant – Well, he does have a style of his own, though it got watered down in Good Will Hunting and – I’m not even sure what he’s made since then…
But against what I’d have thought, that “detactched youth” look works well here: Random teens getting through their day at school, interacting or terribly lonely, with long, long takes, sometimes of the same scene from different points of view. The only difference in this day is that two of the teens have made a plan to blow up the school and shoot as many students as they can.
Though the bombs don’t go off, they succeed with the body-count, and while there are plenty of slow-motion moments of a teen looking at a sky, or putting on a sweatshirt, there is none of that fetishization of image on gunshots or deaths. There is also no explanation, no 3 minute segment of psychological insight which allows the omnipotent viewer to understand why.
I’m sure this film from 2003 got plenty of bad reviews – and was also roundly ignored by media and moviegoers alike. To make such a film that reflects one of our TV news disasters-of-the-week in such a beautiful, yet unsentimental light had to have been seen as being in bad taste by people who lapped up gory details on TV news and loved “Collateral Damage.”
Good for Van Sant for making the film. It’s well worth seeing.
I really like this film a lot. In particular, the lyricism Van Sant squeezes out of the banal repetitions of life in an all-American institution. The way the camera floats through the labyrinthine halls of the suburban high school following one student after another is mesmerizing (in a good way, I think). Harris Savides work as cinematographer is brilliant (he also shot Birth which, even at its most ludicrous, is always compelling to watch). I also liked the use of sound in Elephant–the diagetic background noise occasionally transmogrifying into something eerily expressionistic as the film momentarily moves away from a cold and clinical document of teenage ennui to allow the viewer aural glimpses into the characters’ inner worlds. I also liked the way the film captured the cacophany of high school life with its band practices, choral rehearsals, hallway conversations, athletic drills, and classroom discussions merging and blending in and out of one another and reverberating off the walls, etc. Finally, I love the way the narrative wraps around itself, returning to key moments of actions from different perspectives and utlizing different contexts. As a film that was mostly improvised by non-actors, Van Sant maintains a great amount of control over his material and achieves something best described as formalist in its aesthetic. That being said there are two scenes that stick out to me as problematic: the kiss and the self-induced vomiting in the halls. I didn’t mind the kiss but I think that moment of human vulnerability could have been played as something a bit less prurient, and the girls vomiting in the bathroom struck me as the easiest of cliches (but maybe that’s the point). Interesting to watch this film alongside Frederick Wiseman’s doc High School. The plaintive shots of empty hallways is a key visual motif in both. Good stuff.
I agree with everything you say Jeff – the kiss was off somehow, in tone and everything else.
Dayna (my wife) and I talked about the use of sound a bit – the 12 minute bonus feature showed that the scene of the jock in the red seatshirt walking back to school from the field was miked – there was a sound boom visible in the doc – which is odd b/c 1. they overdubbed Beethoven over the scene and 2. what were they trying to get anyway? No words are being spoken, and it’s not like they were filming in the middle of a real school day.
I also read that Elephant won the Palm d’Or in 2003! Wow! I guess it was well received by some.
Van Sant’s new film – about Kurt Coabin – shows at Cannes this year. Two friends saw it already and said it was abyssmal. We’ll see.