I did not like Elephant. I appreciate the thoughtful reviews above, and I'm glad they were able to discern something in the film that I missed, but the fact remains, elephantine and unignoreable, that the film left me cold, and slightly repelled.
I suppose you might say, of course you should feel repelled, it is a film about a high school shooting. It isn't meant to be nice. I get that. My revulsion wasmn't aimed at the events on screen, however, but at the presentation of events by the film makers.
The film is technically superb. Van Sant has declined over the years. The talent that made Mala Noche two decades ago now produces - the verbs have been chosen judiciously - work such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forester. Mid-brow crap. Good, polished, mid-brow crap, but lets not pretend it's anything more than it is. That said he's always been technically brilliant, no matter how banal thepiece he's attached his name to - beautifully images, adroit camera work and framing, excellent editing and that elusive quality of texture where a simple shot seems to convey some quality of depth or meaning beyond the disparate elements. And, at his best, he's always managed to make his films seem effortless, no matter how technically adept they are. Mala Noche has the feel of the Greatest Home Movie Ever Made, when in fact it is a densely wrought piece played by a group of excellent actors.
Elephant, for what it is worth, has many of these qualities. The cast in particular are superb. It is noteable that some of the characters they have to play veer towards caricature - the clique obnoxious Bratzb ,itching between their bouts of bulimia, the awkward, shy girl with her own body insecurities and, inevitably, spectacles. The film is at its best when it is avoiding such trite characterisations, when we aren't given obvious pointers to what sort of character we're being presented with.
It is also beautifully presented. Van Sant knows how to create a mood with lighting, how to create an effect by moving his camera. But herein lies my issue with Elephant. The narrative has been coyly constructed so events unfold from several different perspectives and in a nonlinear fashion. Obviously, you have to do something along those lines when you're dealing with a limited time frame and you have several different characters all in different places - I get that. But this film goes beyond that necessary parralell construction, and makes its irregular timeframe a feature of the film itself. So the opening minutes are - in digetic terms - only moments away from the final scenes, but seperated by an hour or so of screen time. We see the killers, armed and intent, entering the school, then the timeframe shifts to earleir in the day, as we follow different characters as they move towards the bloody denoument.
Why is this a problem? Because it seems to me to be a deliberate, exploitative attempt to creat etension, to engage the audience emotionally, and focusing their conciosuness on their own nervous anticipation of events - will it be now? Now? NOW?! We might all know that the elephant is in the livingroom, but the preoccupation is not what to do about it, but when it is going to go rogue.
I must add, the much-commented-on non-linear construction isn't anything to get excited about. It is, essentially, a gimmick, the sort of thing you might expect from a premium episode of a TV show like ER. The startlement that greets a film that tweeks with its time frame says more about how low our expectations of cinema in general have become,trather than than the excellence of the film causing the stir.
It is also interesting that time-manipulation is a favoured tool when the film-makers are addressing some unpleasant topic - Gaspar Noe's Irreversible being the obvious exemple of this. Perhaps they feel that twisting the timeframe gives their work a particular gravitas, or intellectual weight. It isn't just a nasty little story about something unpleasant happening, it's a challenging and provocative piece of cinema. I'm not buying it. Elephant isn't as petulantly attention seeking as Irreversible - Noe is a director to whom the term enfant terrible may be applied more literally than is usual - but it is arid.
So, in the end, the film becomes exploitative. It becomes about who dies and who lives, about our mounting trepidation as we move into the final twenty minutes - for Van Sant rejects the only intellectual justification for his muddled time frame and has the climactic blood bath at the end, rather than dropping it on us - or, even more courageously - not including the shooting sequence at all.
Elephant is not the great film that needed to be made about this subject. It is a pity that it may, for all the doubts expressed above, be the best treatment the subject of high school violence receives for a long time.
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