Ready to Rent Ready to Rent (May 14, 2004)

Elephant

Warner Home Video VHS and DVD

1 hr 21 min

Director: Gus Van Sant

Gus Van Sant's wrenching "Elephant," winner of last year's Golden Palm at Cannes, lingers in the twilight world of pre-tragedy that had me squirming throughout its 81-minute running time. Director Van Sant has hit a type of renascence stride with his directing style, embellishing last year's "Gerry" and this film with a type of mesmeric quality through the use of silence and camera fluidity. Van Sant keeps the audience in a type of limbo while we follow five students throughout their morning in an unnamed American high school (the film was shot in Oregon). We open with John (John Robinson), an impish bleached blonde who is being driven to school, and he eventually has to wrestle his drunken father for the wheel of the car in order to arrive safely. John leads us to the minstrel-like Eli (Eli McConnell), who walks the school grounds with his camera in search of pedestrian models for his photography class.

Through Eli's travels the camera stops to capture football practice, shot in a type of static slow motion to the sighs of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." This is interrupted by Michele (Kristen Hicks), a nerdy rag doll of a girl who has been berated by her teacher for refusing to wear gym shorts to class, pausing in front of our view to look up at the sky (shades of the primordial moonwatcher in Kubrick's "2001"). We are then led to Jordan (Jordan Taylor), whose jock physique is displayed and admired in the hallways by three blonde muffies, all of whom have just binged in the lunchroom and purged in the bathroom while they calmly banter about breast size. Jordan, meanwhile, meets up with girlfriend Carrie (Carrie Finklea), and they both discuss a possible pregnancy. There is another character path, however, that John encounters toward the beginning of the film - that of Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen), whose arrival at school, dressed in black commando-style gear, signals John's siren to all that will listen. Here Van Sant flashes back to scenes of subtle bullying and intensive social claustrophobia that Alex had experienced. It is best emoted through a scene in Alex's bedroom, where the camera spins slowly around and around to his monotonous playing of "Fur Elise" on a piano, until a harrowing and vulgar crescendo.

We are never given explanations, only passages that cumulate in a chilling bit of dialog where Alex and Eric plan their assault on the school, with Alex punctuating it with "remember, have fun." How "Elephant" handles its climax is emotionally shocking and purely visceral but, like the film, never disrespectful. Van Sant, always interested in youth culture, tries only to capture the complexities of teenage life by never adopting an authoritative voice. He lets his cast of non-professional performers act and react with their own voices, giving credence to the touchy subject. What the film ultimately achieves is a type of transcendence, where scenes have a phantom documentary-like feel. We know what will happen at the end and are powerless to stop it, but the monotony of the film creates a false sense of security, with only violence to wake our consciousness. -Joe Ramirez

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