Elephant is it. Though technically fiction, the film makes no effort to hide its origins. We track various high school students through the course of about an hour as "Eric and Alex" prepare to wage war against the unfeeling, uncaring hordes of zombie students. Shoot 'em in the head, Eric and Alex! As you can guess, that's not quite how Van Sant portrays the events. Elephant is a truly poignant exploration of the contrast between an average, mundane day at high school, and the explosion of violence that we know is on its way. Van Sant brilliantly choreographs the events of this hour as a series of roughly 5-minute tracking shots that follow first one set of characters, then another, then moves onto the next chunk of time. Every character either passes by or interacts with every other character, so that some events play out multiple times from different perspectives. Elephant is even more impressive than your average effects monstrosity because it moves fluidly and effortlessly through an entire school and hundreds of students, faculty and staff over and over again, with flawless continuity and increasing tension. Somehow, the almost documentary-like act of watching the same events unfold more than once adds to the sense that something bad is going to happen. Plus, Van Sant uses an incredibly simple but effective visual style. Most of the shots are wide-angle SteadiCam moves that manage to convey the boredom and tedium of high school, but with a realistic and artful beauty. I only wish my high school had been as lovely and melancholy. Mostly all I remember is trying not to get a boner walking between classes. Aside from the sheer technical value of the film, it convincingly portrays all of the students as not particularly interesting, exciting or, even in the case of Alex and Eric, preposterously bad or evil. They're all just kids making their way through another boring day in high school. This works on an emotional level because when the attack does occur, you almost feel like you're watching it happen to people you know. You find yourself invested in the characters, from the mousy nerd girl who says three our four words in the entire film to the handsome jock with the tarted-up girlfriend. It helps that the acting is totally natural and believable across the board. There's not a fake moment in the film. The downside is that at times Elephant feels as tedious as high school, and after like eight endless tracking shots, you look forward to the forthcoming attack if only to break the monotony. Also, Van Sant's social engineering project often seems painfully overt - the only classroom that's shown is actually a Gay & Lesbian Alliance meeting, inexplicably in the middle of the day, and Van Sant lingers on the proceedings as if these marginally intelligent kids are a Reverse Star Chamber of acceptance. Later, Van Sant makes the outright assertion that Eric and Alex are closeted homosexuals. I'm not against that theory, but to pin the unleashing of primal uncontrolled rage on sexual repression seems a bit pat, given how complex the rest of the film plays. But it's equally clear that he's also making a statement about how we tend to forgive the sometimes cruel excesses of the beautiful people at the dire expense of everyone else. And how it's surprisingly easy to order high-powered rifles over the internet. When the attack finally arrives, it's a terrifying anti-climax devoid of the usual Hollywood style chaos. Within a few minutes of the first shots, the school pretty much empties out, leaving Alex and Eric alone, searching in disappointment for more targets. None of it plays out quite the way the kids plan, or we expect, which furthers Van Sant's masterful illusion of reality. Ultimately, Elephant is slightly less than the sum of its truly remarkable parts. Though it thankfully doesn't offer any complete answers or explanations, there's no catharsis, no swelling music, no unvarnished heroism, it's so relentlessly clinical that it almost … almost … verges on shallow. It might be silly to say it, but after such grim proceedings, you really want the option to cry, or at least get a lump in the throat. And you walk away from the film feeling just as confused and unhappy as the aftermath of Columbine '99. One can only hope that Columbine 2099 will end as the first catastrophe should have, with Moon Eric and Space Dylan flying a JetCar into the Moon Trade Center Towers.
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