The tactility of the sky’s clouds in Gus Van Zant’s Elephant is the most successful confluence of art and exposition in the film. The opening frame is pervaded with clouds that shift and rhyme; that show friendliness tied to dread, puffed up by vanity.
Throughout the film, the changing of the clouds’ depiction echoes that of the students’ fate (indeterminate, then ominously destructive). Fundamentally, the clouds symbolize the white elephant that is today’s atomized high school culture.
Van Sant takes great care to contextualize the students of the film with long takes, rhythmic in their naturalistic, unlaboured sense. Van Sant marvellously gads and plods, ascends and descends, about with a handful of teenage pupils from school football field bleachers to flights of steps, hallways, locker rooms, cafeterias and libraries. As we enter, on the shoulder of these kids like little Jiminy Crickets, each locale summons up the tag-along feelings of despair, insecurity and, dialectically enough, thrill that come with the embarrassment of school showers or the deluded excitement of popularity.
Unfortunately, this great aesthetic toil on Van Sant’s part amounts to a sabotaging existentializing of the several students we meet, keeping us on the outside of things.
The film’s timeframe is 15 minutes – the penultimate moments in the lives of the student and faculty politic ready to face their assassins. Temporally, there’s some dislocation as Van Sant employs a Rashomon-minded account from multiple perspectives of the students, and does so somewhat bombastically.
The tonality of the film strikes us dumb. Cobalt blues quietly take the air next to concrete grays, a perfect primer for the heterogeneous bunch of kids making up the fore-, middle- and background of a suburban tragedy, as ready to happen as an explosive with a blazing fuse.
Raspy rascals or not, John (the kid whose dysfunction and iconoclastic teeny-bopper looks make him interesting), Eli (the photography student who’s equally liked and derided for his scary-in-its-alien-but-coolly-expressive hobby), Nate (the beau ideal jock who makes you want to question the fairness of life to begin with), Carrie (the princess-bitch “who just slapped a girl last Friday for checking out her man”), Brittany, Jordan and Nicole (the circle of girls who think they’re ready for the real world because they hate home – the girls who force themselves to throw up to stay skinny and cute and the girls who find sublime egocentricity in their moaning about “why mom checks under my bed?”), Michelle (the ugly girl who has to work in the library during lunch to avoid being made fun of), and Alex and Eric (the kids who are faceless in school – the kids who only get picked on maybe once a month with a spit ball or something, but nothing major; the kids who find the weight of their desperation so heavy that they special order guns and bombs, and go to school the next morning to “pick them [students] off one by one.” “Yea!”), are all kids we knew or perhaps know.
Unfortunately, Van Sant depopulates the film, giving it a tinny sort of feel from time to time. The lunchroom doesn’t sound cacophonous like a real lunchroom, and the hallways seem bare, as the result of directorial mismanagement.
Worst of all: We never get to know these kids beyond roving steadicam shots, posters on their walls and the kind of milk they drink. Elephant is a valiant experiment in existential pathology gone tepid.
The film was originally made for television exhibition on HBO, then, prizes at Cannes urged Fine Line to jump aboard as the theatrical distributor.
